19th April 2012, 05:11 PM
BAJR Wrote:Unit has a unique interpretation on life in general... but can come up with some gems.
Back on this though, when I was a planning archaeologist I looked at it like this… having a trigger… good idea.. BUT as I was going to have to check each app to ensure they had not missed anything then what was the point. I was going to check each one anyway with my own filter. Admittedly I was only dealing with about 1500 is apps a year. Relying on the Planning Officer to note an app that needs further examination for archaeology seems to defeat the purpose of a planning archaeologist. I saw that as my job
I can understand where you're coming from if you were dealing with 1,500 applications total per year - but one of our Districts could generate that many alone. Across the county there's going to be somewhere in the region of 10x that number of planning applications. If you add in all the County-own applications, solicitor enquiries, utilities works, pre-apps, etc I guess we'd be looking at somewhere between 15,000 and 20,0000 applications per year. This simply wouldn't be sustainable between the two of us to manually scan and appraise every single application.
You say that you felt a trigger would be no use to you as you'd be having to check each app to ensure they'd not missed anything anyway - surely if the trigger was robust and the planning officers were clear on how it worked then you wouldn't need to check. We're not relying on the planning officer to note whether an app needs further examination for archaeology - we're making that decision by saying that any application that falls within a 'trigger area' will come our way. What we are doing is filtering out those applications that we do not feel we need to see. Whilst I understand your method was different I hope you will appreciate that this is a system that works for us and given the staffing levels and number of applications we are dealing with is the only sustainable way of dealing with things.
I was perhaps a little harsh on unit - like gold panning, after sifting through loads of murky sludge there might be a small nugget of gold there. For me though I find there's often an awful lot of mud to get through and when it comes to currators and his attitudes to planning all I ever seem to come across is a lot of pyrite (and no that's not cockney rhyming slang for sh*te, but...)!