Fenland District Council to relax archaeological planning regulations

[P Prentice]

dont be fooled by the gdubyer stupid ignoramous act, he is the expendable spearhead for an incidious money grubbing attack from the rancid right who under the cloak of economic despair will make new fortunes at all our expense

he might also be exactly what we need to galvanise our disparate profession into doing something about our future

clearly he is on to a loser if he commissions a survey with the intent of supporting his own agenda - so let's keep his fellow councillors and his voters properly informed without recourse to insult or slander - yer knob ed

are you related to him unit or have you been in the heart of darkness so long you still dont know who OA east are

[BAJR]

Indeed. lets keep this discussion sensible and reasonable. A lot of people are looking on, and so we need to be proud of what we write and happy to have it read by other grown ups.

IF we want to win, then we act like it.

:face-approve:

[ShadowJack]

@Unitof1 (brain cell?)

[FONT=Arial][SIZE=3]oxford county councils archaeology department

Gosh - how terribly witty (not)

But I do think you've hit on something fundamentally rotten at the core of

[BillyPilgrim]

Rather than be paranoid, I do hope this is not an attempt by the Concervative High Command to test the waters with an expendable minor councillor. Helps prepare the way for a more concerted effort.

I have to say that I'm slightly worried that this may be the case as well. Not as part of some coherent ?plot?, but certainly as an event that other councillors/Gov't members may be keeping an eye on to see what they can get away with. As many people have said, and is set out excellently in the Finds and Features blog, this is unlikely to get very far because of PPS5 etc. However, I was reading a blog on Lib Dem Voice yesterday (please note I?m not a Lib Dem!) that did make me wonder how much longer PPS5 would be a hindrance to people like Alan Melton:

A little-noticed policy of the Coalition is that of throwing out the entire planning system and replacing it with about fifty pages of pro-development planning policies. This is called the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) and is intended to be the entire amount of national planning policy governing development.

Simplicity and brevity sound great, though, so why worry? Well, Planning Minister Greg Clark gave the task of re-drafting the voluminous PPSs to the innocuously-named ?Practitioners Advisory Group?. The four people on this august body are a Director at Taylor Wimpey, a Conservative Councillor on the LGA Board, a representative of ?Major Developers? to DCLG, and the Acting Head of Sustainable Development at the RSPB. What did a group 75% made up of Tories and Developers come up with? Unsurprisingly, a draft planning system that directs planning decisions towards automatically saying ?yes? to any application that brings economic growth, and which puts people and the environment firmly in second and third places in the process.

I don?t really know anything about the NPPF, but is it as bad as it sounds here? As if so, couldn?t Fenland DC be the thin end of the wedge?

[Marcus Brody]

As leader of the Council, he's obliged to represent the views of all residents, so I assume that he's asked whether the people of these towns actually want 11,000-16,000 new homes constructed on their doorstep, without any consideration for archaeological or environmental concerns. It's not enough to simply brand them all as NIMBYs, as if this dismisses the value of any concerns they may have. Similarly, it's not enough to say that the bunny-huggers can inspect the site when the footings are being dug, as by that stage, it's too late to preserve anything significant in situ, and the opportunities for rescue excavation will be severely limited.

Tizzy, if you're writing a formal response, I think it's worth stressing how the statements made by the leader of the Council contradict the Council's own policies. It's surprising how often Councillors are entirely unaware of what their own policies are, and it's more embarrassing for them to be shown up as ignorant on a point of fact than to try to convince them of the value of archaeology. If they don't see any value in it, they can dismiss any arguments to the contrary simply because they don't accept the basic premise, but to illustrate their ignorance of specific policy calls into question their basic compentency to do the job by suggesting that they've opened their mouths before being aware of the facts.

[Tizzy]

Hi everyone! Thank you for all your helpful thoughts on how best we can show the bigotry associated with Cllr. Melton's keynote speech. We have a profession to be proud of, our contribution to the protection of the heritage of this country is oft taken for granted and yes we may be under valued and under paid but there is huge public support for the protection of our fragile and diminishing heritage and ecology, much within Cllr. Melton's middle-England/Scotland/Wales voting public. I do not want to reduce our response to the insulting and derogatory level of Cllr. Melton who uses terms such as 'Bunny huggers'. We can fight back with rhetoric which dispels his arguments and puts the fear of God (who ever that might be) into his middle-England with the very real possibility that without protection measures, both historical and ecological, the wind farm and incinerator in the backyard is a very real threat. Any useful, not libelous information would be appreciate by Sunday at the latest. There other irons in the fire which I can not disclose at the moment - all legal!

[Tizzy]

IFA & Oxford Archaeology Associates(?) are writing an open letter to the TIMES. I am currently in touch with THE INDEPENDENT.

[deadlylampshade]

Well done Tizzy - you're doing a great job:face-approve:

[RuthFT]

Just wanted to say thanks for the feedback and I'm glad the round-up of the issue over on the Finds and Features blog has been useful - if we get any more information let me know and I'll try and keep it updated. Anyone know if we have any statements from the Councils or EH?

[Tizzy]

Let us keep this on the boil! I believe this is a major challenge to heritage protection measures in this country by a desperate government which may, I repeat 'may', be testing the temperature of reaction or the will in the country to fight to keep this reforms in place at a time of economic national difficulty. The notion, as muted in Cllr. Melton's keynote speech to the construction industry that money saved on heritage investigations could be diverted to fund education is as we all know drivel; any money saved will go back to developers either as project savings, bonuses or dividends. Do not get me wrong we need and must support as a heritage industry a strong economy. Profit is not an obscene word, although I would like to see some for archaeologists pay, but company profits must not be at the expense of hard won heritage protection reforms which have taken decades to put in place.