How should British Archaeology be run

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as I understand it we dont have it in statutory law but we do have the "consideration" of archaeology hanging off regulations related to planning law and international and EU treaties. Basically anybody undertaking development is supposed to "consider" the archaeology that might be affected by their development. As far as I see it they should come to an archaeologist and get advice/consideration. That advice could be no further work recommended and I would like to be paid for that advice. This advice should then be presented to the autherising authority before the granting of permission. This is not what happens. What happens is that the authorising authorities tell the developer what consideration that they would like and quite often it is after/or a condition of the planning permission having been granted. In most cases of development no archaeological consideration is considered to be required or if the permission has been granted the archaeologist has been presented with a fait ocomeplee and by which time you are basically going through the motions of established practise and standards where the only inventiveness that you have will be some very inadequate contingancy which you probably negotiated away in the tender unless you happen to land some public sector financed gravey train job

I would rather be in the situation that the developer has to gamble that my advice will satisfy the granting of the permission. Yes the authorising authority might like to pay for some advice or get free advice about the archaeological condition through the right of the public and other archaeologists to appeal about the applicaction within the application process. This system has been shown to work in cases where objectors have used the objection system to raise all manner of objections not only archaeology.