Saturday 13 October 2012

Archaeology, jobs and roads

Honestly, you write a blog post and then before you know it, six months have passed and it’s time to write another! Couple of things caught my eye recently- most recently was the government announcing plans to revive a series of road building schemes that had been shelved, seemingly funded somehow by a combination of local authorities and commercial capital (because that kind of thing has worked SO well in the past…). This seems to be part of some kind of on-going CONDEM campaign to cause chaos in local authority planning departments. Combined with HS2 and the fantastic policy of kick-starting the economy by allowing people to build slightly bigger conservatories, this is yet another policy seemingly intended to cause immense levels of contention at local planning level. It is tempting to suggest, only partially tongue in cheek, that the idea is to cause massive problems in local government planning so that they then have a strong argument for removing planning from local authority control and centralising it in Whitehall. I did rather depressingly hear a Tory MP on Any Questions the other week talking about placing underperforming planning departments into ‘special measures’; exactly the same term used to for ‘underperforming’ schools which are now forced out of local education authority control and into ‘academy’ status, with a line of accountability that runs straight from school to ‘sponsor’ to Whitehall- conveniently cutting out all those tiresome local authority people and democratically elected councillors. As I understand it, this policy of hacking away at local authorities and replacing them with Whitehall is called ‘localism’. Anyhow, as an archaeologist, my hackles tend to rise and this kind of thing. On the whole, I tend to prefer not to see archaeological sites, historic landscapes, listed buildings etc destroyed – sorry, I’m just a bit funny like that. Indeed, another recent article in the paper that caught my eye was one that highlighted that 20 years have elapsed since the Twyford Down protests. This was the first of a series of environmental protests that kicked off in the early 1990s. The one that I saw up-close was the anti-Newbury bypass campaign- which saw the emergence of Archaeologist and Development as a pressure group. I well remember attending a rally at the site organised by the group. The trouble is, and very few archaeologists I think admit this, is that whatever the pros and cons of road construction (both in environmental terms and as an act of Keynesian economic stimulus), archaeology is just another subcontractor of the construction industry. Due to the way in which archaeologist sits within the planning system, we have a commercial archaeological sector that exists to fulfil the developers legal obligations to meet concerns about the threat to archaeological deposits. Commercial fieldwork units competitively tender for work and derive most, or more usually all, of their income from such contracts. We’ve seen this very clearly in recent years; the recession led to a collapse in construction and a consequent collapse in commercial archaeology, with extensive lay-offs and many businesses going under. If (and it is a big if) all these new road schemes go ahead, it will mean lots of jobs for those working in the commercial sector. Bad for archaeology but good for archaeologists – this is a paradox I’m not sure how to resolve. I am concerned for the environment and don’t want to see the damage wrought by the road building schemes, but I have many friends and colleagues who work in the commercial sector and for whom these kind of projects mean jobs. Which should take priority?

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

whats so good about local authority planning control ?

David Petts said...

Local authority planning control is often far from ideal - and this is for a variety of reasons - they are often understaffed and overworked- they are also constrained by the legislation planned centrally- also, to be fair, there is immense variation in the quality of individual planning officers of all levels. I certainly don't think there is no room for change or improvement. However, I find it very hard to see how centralising planning could possibly work- at least, local planning is, notionally, open up to intervention through locally elected councillors and the planners do or ought to have local knowledge. I have no problem with addresing the functioning of planning at a local or national basis; I do however have real worries when existing controls are simply being chipped away as part of a dubious and ideologically charged attitude to development.

Anonymous said...

so are local authorities are immune from having a dubious and ideologically charged attitude to development ?

David Petts said...

Mark, of course some local authories have a politicised approach to plannng, and its not a good thing. But as I made clear, I'm not making a blanket defence of all local authority planning departments, but I am querying the current administration's approach to the planning system.

Anonymous said...

I am querying local authority reponses to economic downturn where they comprise introducing series of new charges on developers (local taxes) for ever spuriuos and meaningless restrictions and validations, which have limited and sometimes detrimental effects on envirionmental protectionsim, in order to finanace their jobs, the implementation of which could make them overworked; now local authorities are subcontractors of the development industry also. I have some worries also about a response based on protecting (non-local authority)jobs for friends and colleagues without then having anything to dig up, although there will still (for the moment) be some local authority people to regulate them doing nothing. As an alternative to a central keynesian road-building approach,perhaps you could have a new monetarist approach without a central bank implemented by local authorities, perhaps by privitising money.

David Petts said...

Thanks for that- I'm interested in the idea of planning being subcontractors of the construction industry- it's an interesting idea (I'm genuinely not being sarcy here). You are right, things are much more complicated than they first appear. D