Examination of Witnesses (Questions 44-57)
MR PETER
HINTON AND
DR GILL
CHITTY
1 JULY 2008
Q44 Chairman: For our last session this
morning, we turn to archaeology and can I welcome Peter Hinton
of the Archaeology Forum and Dr Gill Chitty. Can I ask you, what
impact do you think the Bill is going to have on how we protect
archaeology and do you generally support the provisions within
it?
Mr Hinton: Thank you very much,
that is an excellent question. Answering on behalf of the Archaeology
Forum, perhaps I should just explain that we are an informal grouping
of independent non-central government bodies who try to get together
to try and give fairly clear and consistent signals on issues
of advocacy from a sector that is perhaps famous for its diversity,
perhaps reflecting the range of skills and activities in the sector.
One thing which has come through very clearly from all of our
members is the wholehearted support of the principles that underpin
the draft Bill. We realise that the Bill really recognises the
role that heritage has in terms of sustainable communities, in
making, as a previous witness said, the world a better place to
live in terms of place-shaping and in terms of economic, social
and cultural regeneration. It is a very good thing that it brings
together a very disparate, complex and obscure set of existing
legislation and practices that have served to cause a great deal
of confusion over the years, not just to the general public, but
to heritage professionals as well which often leads to an appearance
of arbitrariness in the decision-making by heritage professionals,
arbitrary verging on the contrary from time to time, and I think
that making a more effective, open system will make it much clearer
that the heritage community is not opposed to change, it is not
trying to fossilise a historic environment in aspic, but, as archaeologists,
we quite like change actually; it is rather our business. Better
integration with the planning process you have heard a lot about,
and that is certainly something that we wish to see more work
done on, but we are very pleased to hear that the intention is
to put the historic environment at the heart of the planning process,
and we have welcomed the commitment from successive ministers
not to weaken protection. In terms of the big wins that we see
in the Bill, we are very pleased to see the commitment to improving
the clarity and indeed parity for marine archaeological assets.
The requirement for local authorities to have a historic environment
record is something that our forum has campaigned for for many
a year and we are delighted to see that, as we have campaigned
for the expansion of protection to cover sites without structures,
palaeo-environmental deposits, artefact scatters and things like
that, which can slip through the net of current legislation. I
too have not yet had the privilege of seeing the section on Conservation
Areas, but the commitments published in the guidance to the Bill
to restore protection back to its former levels is extremely welcome,
as is the move to give greater protection to heritage and open
spaces, so very positive feelings about it.
Dr Chitty: I think it would be
fair to say that there are ways in which, we think, it could be
even better, and we would like the opportunity just to mention
a few of those. It is in the nature of being towards the end of
the session that some of what we say will be a reprise of what
people have said already, but perhaps you can forgive that. We
think it is absolutely fundamental that we have a new PPS to embed
what is a very new approach, a lot of new language, some very
new concepts in the Bill, in national policy, and to ensure that
there is clarity and consistency across the whole spectrum of
the planning system to deliver those principles because this Bill
of course only addresses designation, protection of the specific
assets, and clearly the historic environment is a lot bigger than
that. A new PPS would serve a number of valuable purposes, the
first of which, as many other colleagues have mentioned, would
be to have a very public imprimatur from DCLG of the value of
this within the whole system of planning for sustainable communities,
and a very practical purpose of it could be to bring together
what is a whole raft of secondary legislation, supplementary guidance
and amendment of other legislation; there is a great portfolio
of other tasks to be accomplished alongside the primary legislation
Thirdly, we think it will be very valuable to recapture something
of the vision of "The Power of Place" and "A Force
for our Future". A Bill is necessarily a very practical piece
of apparatus with process and procedure, but a new Policy Planning
Statement would be a very valuable way of restating that vision
that we all have for why we need this change and what it is going
to do in the bigger picture.
Q45 Chairman: Obviously the setting
up a statutory requirement on local authorities to maintain heritage
environmental records you have referred to as something you welcome
and have called for, but you will have heard from all of our previous
witnesses the considerable concerns that are being expressed that
local authorities may not have either the resources or the skills
required to meet these new responsibilities. Is this a concern
you share?
Dr Chitty: On HERs themselves,
as our colleague Jan Wills has already said, these exist or Sites
and Monuments Records, at any rate, have existed for many decades
and local authorities and indeed English Heritage have invested
very heavily in them, so, in terms of resourcing for HERs, what
we are talking about is bringing them up to a new benchmark standard
and at the moment the compliance standard, whatever it may be,
has not been published, so it is quite hard to look at the figures
in the impact assessment and say whether they are fair or not.
I think it is true to say that, intuitively, we feel they may
be a bit light, but we are very reassured to hear that the LGA
is taking the lead with the Department and English Heritage in
looking closely at some of those estimates and monitoring how
it goes in the early period because I think that will give us
a much better feel. HERs are very variable, they are very diverse,
some of them are absolutely excellent, others have been the victim
of little investment, so clearly the funding needs are going to
be proportionate to the situation in different authorities and
I think that is the case with other areas of resourcing too which
is why it needs looking at in detail. On the broader issue, Peter,
would you like to comment?
Mr Hinton: I absolutely would
agree that we do not feel that we are in a position to dispute
the impact assessment in terms of the amount of resources that
will be required to bring historic environment records up to that
baseline. What our ambition would be of course would be to have
historic environment services that go beyond the baseline of providing
that historic environment record. You heard earlier on from our
local government colleagues of the important range of activities
that local authorities carry out with regard to the historic environment,
and clearly what we are looking at here is resourcing one of their
tools which is the record. We would like to see greater investment
in local authorities so that they can actually play to their best,
play to their strengths, and clearly, as has been raised with
you before, there are a number of skills issues which we could
expand upon.
Chairman: It is worth saying also, as
I said to the previous witnesses, given you have not yet had a
chance to have a look at the additional clauses which have been
made available, if you wished to come back to us with any further
observations, we would be keen to hear them.
Q46 Rosemary McKenna: What will be
the effect of the devolution of responsibility from DCMS to English
Heritage for the designation of land-based assets in England?
Mr Hinton: I think we are very
comfortable with this proposal in the Bill. We recognise that
there will be a need for English Heritage to invest over some
considerable period of time in getting the list descriptions and
other existing documentation up to a fit standard for the future
and that will need a strategic and staged approach, but the principle
of devolution is something that we are very comfortable with and
we feel that that is a form of accountability that fits well in
the modern world.
Dr Chitty: I think there are two
specific areas actually where it would perhaps be useful just
to unpack some of the issues that might relate to urban areas
and to rural ones. One of the responsibilities, as we understand
it, that will come from English Heritage to local authorities
is that for managing the class consent system. Now, we have not
seen the details of what is proposed there and it is another area
where we are waiting for details, but we do have a very welcome
assurance in the White Paper that the Class 1 consent for continued
cultivation of designated sites would be revoked. The implications
of that are not straightforward and there is certainly an area
there for the Department and for English Heritage to explore with
local authorities as to the implications of developing the management
agreements to take the place of that class consent, agri-environment
schemes which might takes its place or indeed compensation issues
which might arise for local authorities in inheriting that responsibility,
so that is certainly something, we feel, which needs to be pushed
forward now. Clearly, any reformed system cannot really support
the continuation of this aberration whereby some of our most vulnerable
and important sites, such as Verulamium Roman town, for example,
continue to be ploughed and damaged year on year, despite the
fact that they are actually designated. The other area of possible
interest in terms of local authority resources relates to the
repeal of the second part of the 1979 Act, which one of my colleagues
mentioned earlier, where Areas of Archaeological Importance will
no longer exist under the new provisions, and I think we all accept
that the provisions of the PPG have largely superseded the need
for that and it was never a very effective additional layer of
protection, but it did offer some extra controls, particularly
over permitted development and the operations of utility companies.
I have not seen the Conservation Area drafting either, but we
do hope that the new Conservation Areas, which can apply as Areas
of Special Archaeological Interest, might well take the place
of those AAI designations and indeed many other historic town
centres that deserve them to have that extra level of control
over activity in urban centres.
Q47 Mr Evans: When you look at this
Bill and at conservation and heritage generally in this country
and when you look abroad, are you envious of another country which,
you think, does it far better than we do it here or are about
to do it here?
Mr Hinton: I think my answer to
that question would be that there is considerably less legislation
covering the historic environment in this country. Most other
European countries have much tougher legislation. Whether that
legislation is actually effectively enforced varies a lot, and
certainly there are a number of European countries where one gets
the impression of very powerful legislation that is just not taken
seriously by law enforcement authorities or indeed the bodies
responsible for the heritage. There are a couple of things that
we would like to see additionally that are not here and perhaps
I might just pull a couple of things out. You may be aware from
the written evidence that you have received that there is a degree
of disquiet amongst the maritime archaeology community that one
of the big things on our wish-list is not addressed through this
Bill and that is the removal of the cultural heritage from the
salvage regime; the salvage regime does not seem an appropriate
way of looking after part of our cultural heritage. I recognise
that this may not be the Bill to deal with that, but that is a
bit of unfinished business that should be flagged up. I think
another thing that concerns the practising archaeologists very
greatly is that in nearly all other European countries there is
a system of archaeological licensing which we do not have in England
and in Wales, nor indeed in Scotland, and we do feel there is
a need to bring forward some competence-based right to practise
archaeology, particularly through the commercial world where there
is likely to be damage, where there will be definite damage, as
part of the project design and as part of the archaeological process,
to important monuments because we need to ensure that there is
proper public benefit from that process.
Q48 Mr Evans: Are you saying that
there are too many cowboys in the field at the moment?
Mr Hinton: There are certainly
cowboy tendencies that have the potential to grow. You will understand
that at present anyone can provide commercial archaeological services,
regardless of their background and competence. Our calculations
indicate that, for England, approximately £135 million is
invested every year into the planning process, into the historic
environment, which may affect something like £20 billion
worth of development, and the asymmetry of information that there
is between the service provider and the people who are buying
the services, and there was reference earlier on to the need for
informed and intelligent clients, can encourage the less competent
and the less ethical to provide poor services. Other organisations,
for example, registered organisations with the Institute of Field
Archaeologists, do provide good archaeology for the public and
a reformed market where we can break out of the market failure
that we find ourselves in could actually give much better public
benefit.
Q49 Mr Evans: If you are brave enough,
Peter, I would love to hear some examples where you think money
has gone in and it has been a bit of a shambles because people
have not been properly trained to do the job that they said they
were doing.
Mr Hinton: Well, perhaps, rather
than risk the specifics, I could deal with the generalities. Our
feeling is that one of the things that a move towards accredited
practice could give us is an encouragement for archaeological
service providers, who are capable of doing brilliant work, we
know that, that they do that on all of their projects rather than
on occasional projects, the problem being of an intensely competitive
market where anyone who seeks to add value to their project is
in danger of pricing themselves out of the opportunity to win
the project. That is something that I think the Bill, or particularly
the guidance that underpins the Bill, could address, as too could
reform to the planning guidance. The commitment that we heard
on Friday from Baroness Andrews to bring forward revisions to
planning guidance is encouraging. It has been mentioned that it
is a very tight timescale and we would wish to get into those
discussions very soon, just as we would wish to get into discussions
with DCMS and the Welsh Assembly Government and its advisers about
these issues as soon as possible because they are urgent and they
are troubling the sector.
Q50 Mr Evans: Gill, do you have anything
to add to that?
Dr Chitty: No, I do not, except
that I think that having that very valuable clause about a duty
to take expert advice is exactly the hook that we need in the
Bill for supporting that.
Q51 Alan Keen: You heard Anthea Case
be critical that, although national amenity groups were included
in the draft Bill for consultation, local civic groups and, as
she mentions in her submission, archaeological groups were not.
Did you feel the same as Anthea, that that should be specified
that local archaeological groups should be involved officially
in the consultation?
Dr Chitty: I think there are a
whole range of local specialist groups and amenity groups, including
archaeological ones, that could make a really valuable contribution
in local authority consultations, and I think it is fair to say
that, already in statements of community involvement, many local
authorities are very inclusive, but it would be very helpful to
have that spelled out in some way in the Bill, yes.
Q52 Alan Keen: Unfortunately, our
archaeological expert we have on the Committee is on another committee
this morning, so I am doing my best to fill in for her without
any help from her. I guess that the archaeological groups and
volunteer groups do play a massive part in what you can do and
presumably you would not be able to do very much without them.
Dr Chitty: They do indeed as individuals
and as organisations. We have a network, and I am speaking now
for the Council of British Archaeology, of volunteer groups and
organisations who support us, for example in our current statutory
role as a consultee on Listed Building Consent applications, and
we depend entirely on that national network of volunteers to make
our input into the process, and they are our eyes and ears on
the ground and they are often able to operate in lots of ways
to support our interests at the local level in a powerful way
as a local voice, so yes, a very important part of the network.
Q53 Alan Keen: So you would like
us to mention that when we put our Report together?
Dr Chitty: Yes.
Q54 Mr Evans: Peter, when you were
talking about accredited businesses being the leaders, you are
not talking about their not being able to access the enormous
number of volunteers that come in and get involved, particularly
in digs?
Mr Hinton: Absolutely not, no.
What I was talking about was the opportunity to add a little extra
layer of regulation to some of the commercial service providers.
One of the things that we sometimes see, but, sadly, not often
enough, is commercial archaeological excavations going ahead with
opportunities for public participation and public involvement
and that is extremely valuable. We want the public to be much
more involved in its archaeology, it is not ours. There are about
just under 7,000 of us and we want to share it with the rest of
the world. Our concern is just to make sure really that the environment
is right so that we can get the proper articulation between the
paid professionals and the voluntary sector from which so many
of the paid professionals originated.
Q55 Chairman: Finally, your overriding
concern, understandably, is that this Bill should not result in
any reduction in the level of protection that exists for archaeological
sites. There have been a couple of areas where, it has been suggested,
that might be a risk, such as the abolition of areas of archaeological
importance, but also the change in the definition from `national
importance' to `special archaeological interest'. Do you think
that there is a risk that, perhaps inadvertently, it might lead
to a reduction in the overall level of protection?
Dr Chitty: I think we have already
touched on AAIs and that extra level of control which they offered
and the fact that we hope that, with those five authorities that
currently enjoy the AAI designation, there can be conversations
with English Heritage and the Department to discuss what, they
think, the impact might be of the reduction in that protection
and whether we can look at Conservation Areas of archaeological
interest as an opportunity to build on the existing system and
make it even better, so certainly that is an area that we believe
local authorities should be very actively engaged in developing.
I do not think that means necessarily adding content to the Bill,
but it is all of these additional bits of supporting work that
need to be carried out. In terms of `national importance' and
`special interest', national importance is the criterion by which
the Secretary of State selects sites for designation at the moment
and that is embedded in PPG16 and has been for the last 18 years
as the benchmark for the principle of preservation of sites, whether
they are scheduled or not, and that is quite an important principle.
That wording from PPG16 is embedded in Local Plan policies and
documents throughout the country now. It is very clear and it
is very unambiguous and it has served archaeology extremely well.
I think that, if we are going to move from the concept of national
importance to a concept of special interest, then there does need
to be a very close scrutiny of the selection criteria and of the
possible pitfalls of that transition. I am actually looking at
my notes because it is quite a difficult concept to get across,
but, as we understand it, modernising the system moves the concept
from a need to demonstrate national importance, which is what
we have at the moment, to the need to demonstrate that an archaeological
site might contain evidence of human activity that is of special
historic interest, so, in other words, special archaeological
interest is predicated on the evidence for the existence of special
historic interest. Now, I am not sure if I have explained that
very clearly and, if I have not, that demonstrates really the
fragility of the concepts at the moment, which is not to say that
we do not believe that an overarching concept of special interest
of the historic environment is not the right one to go for, it
is.
Q56 Mr Evans: So are you saying that,
if we do understood that, we were not listening carefully enough?
Dr Chitty: I am not sure I understand
it myself! However, I think what we want is something that is
robust, as robust as what we have got and even better, if we can
get it, that is reasonable, as it has to be, within the planning
system and which is defensible and which all of us who work in
the historic environment sector can go out and work with with
a degree of confidence, and I think that, in order to achieve
that, we need a very direct engagement with the people who are
working on developing these principles and this new language.
Q57 Chairman: Is the key to it going
to be the new Planning Policy Statement?
Dr Chitty: That will be a big
part of it, yes. The principles of selection in the new PPS will
be critical and getting those articulated with the criteria that
we have at the moment, yes.
Mr Hinton: Once again, it shows
how important the guidance, which is still evolving, will actually
be. The devil will be in the detail and we really hope that it
will be more angelic than diabolic, but again we would hope to
be involved much more in that than we have been to date. That
is not a criticism of the process so far. We do recognise that
during the drafting stage DCMS and its advisers would necessarily
be very circumspect in releasing information and had to conduct
their business with a great deal of confidentiality. As we move
beyond that process, we have had assurances that there will be
a greater level of involvement with the sector and I am sure that
that will be essential when you hear issues of the kind of complexity
that Gill has just described; it is going to need a great many
minds coming from different directions to try and untangle that
one.
Dr Chitty: And we are very committed
to getting it right.
Chairman: Well, hopefully we can perhaps
help at least to contribute in some small way to that objective.
Can I thank you both very much.
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