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Yet another site in yet another of my more difficult local authorities where the planner has refused to put on a condition. Yup, he's right, it isn't in a designated archaeological priority area. But does my arguement that it bisects a roman road and have a basement carry any weight at all? Of course not - that would be a reasonable response.
Would write to complain - thereby wasting more taxpayers' money on postage for a letter destined for the circular filing cabinet - but they never sent a decision notice, so only found out today 6 months later. The horse has bolted, the bird has flown - pick your metaphor.
This, oh diggers who shout about the ineffectiveness of curators, is a too often occurance. We are only as good as our planning officers, and they tend to blow....(well, some of them at any rate).
Yours in ever increasing despondancy [xx(]
ML
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And again it is not the curator who undertakes enforcement, but the enforcement section of the relevant planning authority. These tend to be understaffed and under-resourced and frequently do not even understand that the councils have professional archaeological advisors and just seem to think that you are tied to a volunteer group.
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Sigh. I know. Or the planners discharging conditions themselves because random developer bloke sent them in a letter saying they had a look on the a-z and there clearly isn't anything of interest there?? Would mr planner-bloke presume to do the same if it were about, oh I don't know, engineering??
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My worst one is when I sent through a copy of a brief to the planner for their file. On the cover letter as always I specified that they should not discharge the conditions until all works had been completed and I would confirm this in writing. The planner saw 'discharge condition' on the letter and discharged the condition. That was for a major urban cemetery.
Another fun one, in a borough which does not even mention underground archaeology within its UDP, all explanatory material in the document refers only to buildings archaeology, placed a building recording condition on a green field. The text of the condition read 'archaeological and architectural survey of the standing buildings' There was no way they would let me stretch that to the excavation. The curse of the automatic database of conditions...
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Well, you can always give it 10 years in the hopes that the UDP gets re-written (or a mythical LDF?)[:p]
Lately have been having fun with a Council-own development (alomst as bad as the church!!), where they are putting a really big underground building right beside a known 14th century church and graveyard (with a saxon antecedent floating around somewhere...)but try getting an eval done pre-determination? I think I was lucky to get a condition on at all. Can't decide if I want them to find the Saxon cemetery, purely out of spite, or if all fingers are crossed that there's nothing there!
But moaning aside - in several attempts to educate I have in the past given the planning departments jolly talks, which did improve things at least for a little while. Problems are, of course, that I never seem to managed the time to see all of them (and my worst offenders kept on cancelling) and the very transient nature of aussie and kiwi planners! Have you had any successes with them? Or just a brick wall?
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I think a lot of our dominion cousins frankly have no idea about archaeology so, for a while, at least, they are scared they will be destroying everything and this works in our favour.
I do generally find the time servers who have been stuck in the same district and job for years the worst by far - this is not to say there are some absolutely excellent planners who have spent years in the job, have a real interest in their local area and know it well - but there are many others who just go through the motions and really just want a quiet life. The applicants simply have the time to give them far more hassles that I can. I have had more âmistakesâ from this lot than any of the new, wet behind the ears lot from the south. I have always wondered why we do not get Canadian planners, I assume they must have a very different system or career opportunities etc.
I happen to think the South Africans are quite good, especially if they are Afrikaans. A number of them do understand some archaeology and have been exposed to it and they sound very scary on the phone if they are in a bad mood.
Donât mention the church whatever you doâ¦
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To be fair, I also think that it is quite new and groovy to some of the antipodeans, so they don't mind putting on the conditions etc. Don't know about the Canadians though. And would agree that it is the long term more bureaucratic civil service types that are the real problem. And yes, often it does seem that they who shout loudest wins. Unfortunately, I don't have the time to shout very loud, or at least repeatedly, so tend to pick the battles carefully where the effect will be had the most.
Mention the church? Never! Only thing more fun is a church run school...
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Or even a council run school. Do you have a demolishing schools for the future programme where the council try and get everything past you and hope you do not notice. Or get a bunch of the more fun consultants to write the DBAs who basically have no idea about your patch who manage not to notice major, nationally important roman road XXXXX actually, most probably, runs through the playground right under where the new building is proposed - but it did not show up on their search 'because it was out of our search radius' despite passing right through it and being marked on quite a few OS maps.
I am not going to mention the other report from the same fun bunch which left an entire quarter of their search area blank because someone had pasted the contents of the screen of the excel spread sheet into their gis rather than scrolling down to complete the full list of material. It was like a piece of cake had been cut out being a rather busy area of one district.
And relax.
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Glad to hear that curators done always have it there own way!
It actually helps nobody when planners dont follow there specialist advise. I have dealt with cases where the conservation officer agrees with us and the planning officer does not.
Peter
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I agree with this thread. It is very frustrating, I keep shouting, but no-one hears a thing. SHOUTING I said.
Would insert smiley but can't find the right button to press!
nil desperandum
