South Yorkshire Archaeology Service cuts

[Marcus Brody]

so long as the planners implement the New Planning Policy Statements and make it a requirement that there is archaeological consideration given with all the planning applications I don think that closing down south Yorkshires archaeological service will have any impact on the undertaking of commercial archaeology in that region.

It's a big 'if', though, isn't it? IF the planners implement the PPS, and IF they make it a requirement that there is archaeological consideration given with all planning applications, then MAYBE there'd be no impact on commercial archaeology, but in reality the situation is likely to be a lot less rosy. I've posted before about the fact that there's already one Scottish council where the planners appear to make the decisions about when archaeological work is deemed to be necessary, with the result that hardly any new commercial work has taken place over the last couple of years, and I think that a similar situation is likely if the South Yorkshire archaeology service is removed - planners won't have the experience, knowledge or desire to identify when archaeology work is necessary, and so won't ask for conditions, meaning that there will be less work available for commercial firms.

'Ah', you say, 'but the PPS makes it a requirement that all planning applications consider archaeology, so there'd be an automatic need for work regardless of whether there's an archaeologist advising the Council'. All I'd say is 'well, good luck with that, I'll believe it when I see it' - my experience is that blanket requirements of this type are either quickly subject to legal challenge when the developer realises that it's not relevant to the specifics of his proposal, allowing him to claim that it's unduly onerous or burdensome, or are quietly dropped when the planners realise that the only result of the requirement is to involve them in a constant stream of arguements about a subject they probably don't understand and may not particularly care about. Again, the end result is that less work gets done.

There's also the problem of who assesses the validity of all these archaeological reports on behalf of the Council if they don't have their own in-house archaeologist. I'd like to pose a hypothetical situation where, after the removal of all Council archaeologists, the Nigerian Council recieves a report from UnitOf1, concluding that a planning application raises no archaeological issue, and that there's no need for further work. Given Unit's statement on the thread relating to Fenland that he'd willingly change his professional opinion if Councillor Melton 'had enough grease', how could the planner be confident that the assessment that there was no need for further work was correct if he or she doesn't have access to their own archaeological advice? They'd basically be taking it on trust that the archaeologist who prepared the report hadn't been unduly influenced by the depths of the developer's pockets to give advice that minimises the extent of any archaeological issue.

I'm not suggesting that this happens now, or questioning the independence of any commercial companies, but it's something that could happen in the future if there's no-one scrutinising the reports submitted alongside every planning application. After all, there'd be nothing to stop the developer undertaking the study themselves, submitting a report that says 'well, we had a look at a couple of old maps, there's nothing there, so you should just let me go ahead and build whatever I want'. In the current setup, the planner can refer this report to the Council's archaeologist, who can compare it against the HER and their own experience and say 'well that's total bollocks, they've completely ignored the fact that the ark of the covenant was found on the site next door, the holy grail turned up in an evaluation trench on the other side of the road, and the local society found a large chunk of the true cross when working on the site in the 1950s - there's clearly something going on in this area, I think we need an evaluation.'