I recently had cause to ring HMRC’s telephone advice line.  If I have any advice to offer after ringing it, it would be not to bother.  Most of my requests for advice were met with the response:

“I can’t advise you in case you later say that was what I was advised.”

Sadly, this fear of giving advice is not a new phenomenon.  Professional advice has long since dwindled faced with the growing threat of litigation.  No one wants to express an opinion any longer, in case they are sued for it in the future.

My first experience of this was in the case of building surveyors.  In the past, surveyors were typically candid individuals:

“Don’t buy this dump.  It is full of woodworm and will fall down in five years.”

In recent times, their tone has changed:

“I can’t advise one way or the other whether you should buy this property.  There is a chance that it might fall down within five years, on the other hand it might still be standing for another century.”

Sometimes, you just want a genuine, honest opinion.  It might be proved right.  It might be proved wrong.  But you know that it has come from a professional who has more knowledge of the subject that you do, and you take a chance based on this fact.  Screw the consequences; screw litigation; you just want to be given the professional’s best guess given a particular scenario.

I think that it is sad that advice has become something so scantily imparted by the very professionals who know best.  This is why so many people end up turning to social media, where the advice they receive is abundant but, consequently often wrong, unqualified and potentially dangerous.

© Simon Turner-Tree

And so ends Simon Turner-Tree’s advice.

Simon Turner-Tree is author of This Pedestrian Life.