Fenland District Council to relax archaeological planning regulations

[Marcus Brody]

I'd have thought that the proposed removal of archaeology as a planning issue, with all the resultant destruction of sites and job losses that this will cause, would have been sufficiently serious to override the usual tendency on this board for threads to descend into divisive squabbling, but perhaps not. If archaeologists can't agree that proposals such as those put forward by Councillor Melton are a bad thing and present a united front in response, what would it actually take for us to stop sniping at each other and turn our collective fire on those who genuinely deserve it?

I'd also like to highlight another inconsistent element in the Councillor's statement. In the full text of his speech, available here (https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webad...=&P=139432), he says to developers that "The days of the Local Authority employing expensive consultants to evaluate your proposals are gone. If you have an issue with highways, environment agency or whoever, you deal with them and then present the results as part of your application." Maybe I'm being particularly obtuse, but isn't that how pre-determination archaeological evaluation is supposed to work - the developer pays for the evaluation and presents the results to the planning department in support of their application. If it's good enough for highways, environment agency or whoever, why is archaeology singled out for different treatment?