An opportunity for expansionist units

[Odinn]

I spent five years of my field career in such establishments and witnessed many cosy chats between the county DC archaeologist and the managers of the field section discussing particular projects (all based within the same building) . As a consultant I know clients who dislike this set-up

I am certainly aware of clients that are unhappy about dealing with in-house council field units, but I cannot agree with your first statement. While this is true of some council units, as I found when working in one area of the country for an external unit, it is definitely not the case with others. One council unit I worked for was constantly at loggerheads with the curatorial staff in the same council, who appeared to treat it much less well than they did even the dodgier private units. This went as far as the curators leaving the council unit off the list of units that had worked in the county, or, in one memorable case, scrawling obscenities next to the name of the unit on a list that went to a client.

Although county units do not have a monopoly of local work their lower overheads makes for unfair competition.

What lower overheads? In my experience, council units have higher overheads because they have to contribute to the overall council admin budget, among other things.

At my old Council place of work the useless or disruptive were kept hanging around, being more useless and generally soaking up overheads.

So how does this contribute to the lower overheads of the council unit that you mentioned before? It sounds more like it would increase their overheads.

archaeology, in the big scheme of things, isn't a service for the community; it serves those practising it and has an intellectual fringe benefit for that narrow band of the public who express an interest in it.

I'm not convinced that there is only a narrow band of the public that is interested in archaeology. If this is the case, how do you explain the enduring popularity of programmes such as Time Team? It would not still be on the air if it were not a commercial success. The key here is not that archaeology is only of limited interest, but that it needs to be taken to the interested members of the public and promoted. If they are made aware of the work that is being done, they are likely to become more interested in archaeology in general. This leads in to the question of whether archaeology is a service for the community or not. If it is not, then why do we do it and why do developers have to pay for it? For that matter, why do councils have curatorial staff? If archaeology is not a service for the community then the council should not be involved in it in any way, manner or form. As such, there should be no council organisations dedicated to it at any level. Leave it to those that are interested in it to have a go when they can be bothered and remove it from the development agenda. After all, why should developers pay for something that is of no real benefit to the community either?

There is little evidence to suggest that those companies which operate fully in the private sector are any worse at producing good output than anyone else. A fair bit of poor product was turned out by my Council unit, partly (and this is just my personal opinion) because of the blase attitude of the staff, who knew that no matter what they churned out they knew their chances of getting the boot was pretty minimal.

I have seen poor product from both council and private companies. There is little correlation between the quality of the work done and the ties or lack thereof to the council.

Private companies have to compete with each other, and there is a bigger onus on delivering good quality reports to win back repeat business from clients.

In my experience very few clients are interested in good quality reports. They are predominantly interested in cheap reports that are good enough to get accepted by the curator. Getting the job done cheaply and with a minimum of fuss will get you repeat business, not producing a brilliant report that eloquently discusses the site's importance in the field of penis sheath typologies and places the site in its global context.

Competition is good for all as people try harder.

It also leads to greater exploitation of staff as the units cut corners to meet their target budgets by reducing wages, etc., and staff wind up having to work evenings and weekends for free to meet their deadlines or they get sacked despite the fact that the unrealistic deadlines were given to them by the owners of the company.

If a private company is rubbish at what they do; they fail and go under.

Depends how you define rubbish. If you mean that they are too expensive and not willing to bend over backwards for the client then I agree.