Ever since Ian Wright jumped ship from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) to become director of corporate reporting at the Financial Reporting Council (FRC), he has become the enemy of gobbledygook, clutter and general corporate laziness when it comes to telling people what a business is up to.

Earlier in the year, a neat little booklet entitled Louder than Words (in short) pitched on to the desks of finance directors. It told them that their reports were increasingly complex and decreasingly relevant. In 16 pages, it told them how to make explanations of their businesses more useful.

And last week there was another small publication, but with the same punch. This time it came in the guise of a review of the quality of narrative reporting entitled Rising to the Challenge. It scored the efforts of a sample of companies against, among other criteria, the principles of Louder than Words. And while it found that on describing basic financial performance and strategy, most companies did reasonably well, the financial reporting generally fell down badly on simply explaining the company’s basic business model. It also found masses of what they called “immaterial clutter” — for example, one company took time out among the financials to tell its investors how it had been “donating chocolate gifts to the community at Easter”.

During this period of economic uncertainty, companies ought to be making it as clear as possible to investors what they are up to and where they are going. They are not short of advice. Recent surveys from both Deloitte and PwC provide all the detail and critique that anyone could need. And the real value of the two recent reports from the FRC, for all their blunt advice, is that they also major on best practice.

The difficulty is that companies are trapped. Their need to keep regulators and auditors sweet means that creating more and more disclosure is seen as a safe solution. The FRC survey unearthed nine companies whose corporate social responsibility report was actually longer than their financial review. The Deloitte survey plots a continuing rise in the size of annual reports. It is time to reverse the trend.

businessfeatures@thetimes.co.uk

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