Gloucester Council next....

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how does the planner know that you're not just making it up to get more money from your client?

What business is it of the planners what I charge. Its up to the customer to beware you can say it in Latin if you want. The curators live off the polluter pays principle, most of the eu legislation is based on it. Its not my fault that the planners have scared the little old ladies witless with ?no development shall take place until a blar blar balarr has been approved in writing?. I have sick wife and family to take on holiday. Archaeology is a limited resource. There will come at time when there is no more left. ?no development shall take place? any tax farmer can see that should be a very expensive thing or do you know of a statutory rule that says how much I should charge. Ppg used to tell the developer to undertake a tendering system. There a lot of best practise based on tendering. I presume that it will be used to select the service companies who will take over the planning departments

And how does your client know that you're not over-stating the significance of your findings if there's not someone in place to advise the planner to ask for a condition.

Currently this kinda ties into this

"Local planning authorities should require an applicant to provide a description of the significance of the heritage assets affected and the contribution of their setting to that significance. The level of detail should be proportionate to the importance of the heritage asset and no more than is sufficient to understand the potential impact of the proposal on the significance of the heritage asset."

The curators have very nicely not allowed this to happen have they. Is that because it puts them out of job. What does that clause go onto say

[SIZE=3]As a minimum the relevant historic environment record should have been consulted....."
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And we all agree that no one needs an HER

Now it must say in there somewhere that you must have someone to advise the planner and then presumably how. Have you ever seen the advice given between the curators and the planners and what its based on? I have seen short one liners often saying that the HER has no near by records of any archaeology in the area no further work required.

See how it works without curators is that the Client finds me through the grapevine. I provide information which has to go into the public domain with the application over stating the significance of the archaeology. It is the public domain which is the scrutiny. The likelihood is that the client would want me to down play the significance. I am pretty sure the nimbies would pick on me straight away. These situations would generate the precedence for the next case. Currently its more about when the curators are sick or on holiday?.

[SIZE=3]you do need an HER to set the section of ditch or group of pits identified during that evaluation into its wider context. Without some form of record of what's been recorded in the surrounding area, how do you determine that the isolated features you've identified are actually part of the extensive settlement recorded in the next field?
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I suspect that the landowner will not pay me to stare at my navel but I might contenplate it to over state the significance.

PS all this prevaragating by the curators is based around making evaluations their jobs worth. As far as I an concerned they base significance on evaluations and play archaeology with watching briefs?.all curators must follow sulfolks example and make evaluations the first call on any archaeological intervention and make the archaeologists provide the public domain with the statements to state why no intervention is needed or not..