Standard and guidance for archaeological advice by historic environment services

[Marcus Brody]

Still no details about who paid how much for whats to be consullted then. How many meetings, where, when. So much for transparancy in the civil service. Presumably the ifa will cite confidentuality overt the contract with the civil servants.

As I think was pointed out earlier,

The national heritage agencies have provided some funding to allow the IfA to employ a contractor to undertake the donkey work of preparing a draft standard and managing a a consultation process.

I've no idea what the value of the contract was, but surely if anyone's to blame for overcharging in that situation, it would be the private sector consultant rather than the civil servants. Indeed, the 'civil servants' working for the national agencies would have no input in the process, beyond providing the money (as far as I'm aware, the IfA aren't civil servants, so no matter what you think of them, you can't tar them with that particular brush!)

Beyond that, have you actually asked these questions of anyone that was directly involved in the process? It's all very well moaning on a message board about lack of transparency, but I don't think it's reasonable to whinge about the absence of a response unless you've actually asked. As public bodies, the national agencies would be subject to FOI requests, and I think that they also publish a list of grants made - for example, the list of grants made by English Heritage for Historic Buildings, Monuments and Designed Landscapes between 2004 and 2010 can be downloaded here. I'd assume that any grant made for this standards document would appear on a similar spreadsheet in due course.

I'm no particular supporter of the IfA, and on another thread I argued against their suggestion that councils should require developers to use only ROs. It's still my opinion that this would probably amount to restraint of trade and restriction of the market, so I'm not particularly happy to see this resurface in the current consultation document. However, it is still at the draft stage, and I'd hope to see those sections removed (indeed, to everyone on here who objects to them, I'd suggest you should take part in the consultation, as this offers a far more direct route to make sure your views are taken into account). Beyond that, however, I do think that having written standards for curators is no bad thing - just as a contractor should have to meet certain minimum standards, I see no reason why we shouldn't have something against which curators can be measured. If there's a curator who's failing to meet these standards, the existence of a written document that sets out what they should be doing, and more importantly where they're falling short, is likely to prove useful. It would also be helpful in establishing a degree of consistency when working across different areas, as all the council archaeologists would be basing their advice on the same underlying aims.