South Yorkshire Archaeology Service cuts

[Marcus Brody]

Becausewhen the application goes into a period of public consultation. Othercommercial archaeologists (more reputable), have the opportunity to object tothe proposed mitigation as does the public on “archaeological” grounds.…we don’tneeds smrs for commercial work.

Oh Unitof1,don't you ever get bored of making basically the same series of tired responses on every single thread, regardless of what the subject actually is? I can't decide whether you're a) deliberately adopting extreme positions to provoke a response, or b) naive and unaware of the real world to such an extent that you shouldn't be allowed out on your own for the safety of yourself and others.

In this case, I would charitably hope it's b), and you're just being naive in your assertion that there's no need for council archaeologists because the public or other commercial contractors will scrutinise reports submitted in support of planning applications. If you really believe that, all I can say is that I've got some magic beans you might like to purchase, for the knock-down price of just ?50k!

All material relating to planning applications is already in the public domain and usually available for consultation either online or at the planning department, but how often does either commercial contractors or local societies monitor these? I can't see other professional contractors undertaking the sort of systemic monitoring of other people's reports you envisage unless they're being paid to do so (too much of an investment of time and personnel, with no financial benefit to them), while I don't imagine volunteers would find it sufficiently interesting. While there's never a shortage of volunteers wanting to dig, it's always a problem finding people to invest the time to write up the results, and you'd need people willing to do this sort of checking week-in, week-out, for absolutely nothing. You might get people doing it at the start, but they'd quickly drift away after experiencing the mind-numbing tedium of being faced with a never-ending stream of negative reports, leaving a situation where the unscrupulous contractor would be able to submit any old nonsense in the expectation that statistically it's very unlikely that anyone with the experience to say that it's not adequate will ever look at it.

You're also very selective in your use of the PPS, only quoting those sections that (in isolation) appears to support your views, without noting those that don't. Policy HE.2, Evidence Base for Plan Making, is quite clear that 'Regional and local planning authorities should ensure that they have evidence about the historic environment and heritage assets in their area and that this is publicly documented... Local planning authorities should either maintain or have access to a historic environment record...Local planning authorities should use the evidence to assess the type, numbers, distribution, significance and condition of heritage assets and the contribution that they may make to their environment now and in the future. It should also be used to help predict the likelihood that currently unidentified heritage assets, particularly sites of historic and archaeological interest, will be discovered in the future'.

Even policy HE.6, information requirements for applications for consent affecting heritage assets, from which you draw many of your quotes, states that 'as a minimum the relevant historic environment record should have been consulted', while the additional note to Policy HE9.6 states that 'advice and information about the significance of known, but non-designated heritage assets with archaeological interest may be obtained from County Archaeologists and historic environment records, respectively'. Far from setting out a vision for how commercial archaeology would function in the absence of HERs, as your selective quotes would suggest, the need for some form of HER is mentioned repeatedly in the PPS, suggesting that the authors would not agree with your statement that we don't need SMRs for commercial work.