Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the Fens.... It spreads.

[Marcus Brody]

Unit, you're quoting from the policy that they're not planning to follow any more. Try and keep up dear.

To be fair to Unit, he was only re-quoting a section of the policy that I quoted in the message above, and I'm aware that this is the policy that the Council no longer proposes to follow. But the point is that this is part of a core strategy that covers four Councils, which Sandwell only signed up to in February of this year. Local plans and strategy documents like this take several years to prepare and go through numerous consultation phases, so it's worth asking why they signed up to it so recently if they were unsure that they would be able to fulfil the obligations it imposes on them, or that they considered archaeology to be a luxury that they couldn't afford. If this is a policy that the Council didn't support or didn't think was affordable, there would have been plenty of opportunities for them to drop it.

I often get the impression that Councils make this sort of decision without actually considering whether it'll conflict with things they're committed to doing - i.e., the person who makes the decision to drop archaeology is looking only at the bottom line, and may not be aware of the other policies that require the Council to keep the post.