14th December 2006, 01:57 PM
...well pipelines are outside the normal local development controls exercised by your good old local authority that you would have with your standard Town and Country Planning Act/PeepeeG type work. Pipelines are stitched up by a thing called the Public Gas Transporter Pipe-line Works (Environmental Impact Assessment) Regulations 1999 which behind it has compulsory purchase powers encased in Gas Act 1995 which followed the Gas Act 1986. If you go through the references to the Gas licences you will find the public announcements for the six week period in which the you my friend havethe only opportunity that you will ever have to make a representation to (against) the EIA for the construction of a new pipeline (you will be writing to a faceless bureaucrat working on behalf of the Secretary of State- you can say things like I hope the archaeology is not trashed and that food parcels are sent to the diggers on such and such a pipeline-they will laugh and say that English Heritage has said everything is ok). By the time of this announcement (which is put on the gazette site and in a very local paper) the pipeline world have stitched up all the landowners on the pipeline route with the treat of compulsory purchase to sign over their rights (wayleave rights) to the strip of land for the period of the construction to a obscure somebody ( I am not sure who as this is a confidential document between the landowner and somebody in the pipeline world- it might be the engineering contractor or the national gas transporter or some agent( and why it might concern is that it is a document that I think relates to IFA, section 7, Code of approved practice for the regulation of contractual arrangements in field archaeology which is about as close as the IFA get to giving a monkeys about who owns the archaeology and the archaeologists responsibilities and it would appear that it is for archiving purposes, as in are the archaeologists employed by the same people that have control over these murky rights -sorry where was I -Wayleave agreements, all I know is that the NFU and the CLA think that they are wonderful as they agreed the set up with the gas transporters back in the mists of time -anyway the landowner retains ownership of any rocks and things (yes it mentions rocks ) but is rather vague about the archaeology ....which is about as relevant to these peoples Christmas experience I suppose as a brick through darlings window but it is part of the bigger picture and possibly something that they should have considered as to why things are the way they would seem to be......now for employment law as you might know I an into self employment in archaeology based on copyright law âI have yet to plough through http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/independen..._index.cfm but the nights are long