The annual Applied Linguistics Symposium took place last weekend at the University of Tampere. The theme was “Language awareness in an increasingly unequal society”. Keynote speaker Ulla Tiililä spoke about reasons for unequal access to government services. Government agencies nowadays are text factories; their main activity is the creation of new policies, plans and documents. For example, the new Finnish health care and social welfare law mentions 40 different kinds of documents: welfare report, cooperation agreement, service promise and so on. The effort to produce all these documents consumes so many staff resources that there is no time for meeting the customer. For example, studies show that many problems related to social services and healthcare stem from how agencies interact with their clients, but little money goes to improving such interaction. Finland’s public sector has spent over 2 billion euros on IT systems, but agency decisions are still based on standardized wording which officials can’t even edit. The main reason for the foolish policy is an inadequate understanding of language and communication. According to Ulla Tiililä “narrow language awareness has evil consequences and an expensive price tag.”