Chris Budd: What are your clients' objectives?

I was speaking to someone recently who used to be compliance officer for a large, multi-adviser, firm. We were discussing what advisers record as client objectives in suitability letters. He reported that, of the many hundreds if not thousands of suitability letters he had seen, nearly 100% of them recorded the client objective as some variant of: "Your objective is to access our investment proposition in order to achieve above inflation returns." Now, I have two major issues with this. Firstly, it is not an objective. It is an outcome. What they want versus what they say they want...