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Heritage

I could not agree more with my hon. Friend. We owe Sir Neil Cossons a great debt of gratitude, not least for his enormous interest in Stonehenge and other important sites. I reiterate the comments that were made earlier about the debacle over his successor, Two eminent candidates—Lord Marland and Lady Cobham, entirely un-elitist as they are—have not been considered and the whole process leaves a rather unpleasant taste in the mouth. Culture should be used as a political football. I share the worries that have been expressed about the future of English Heritage. I hope that the Minister will be a doughty ambassador for the cause of English Heritage and all it stands for in his negotiations with the Chancellor. We ignore it at our peril. We also look forward to the White Paper, which represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to ensure that we properly preserve our heritage for the future. Back in 2003 the all-party archaeological group made recommendations that have made no progress in Government circles but remain as relevant today as they were then. We recommended that,"““The Department for Culture, Media and Sport…should adopt a new high-level objective of defining, protecting and sustaining the historic environment for the benefit of our own and future generations and it should accept the full consequences of this both in its own spending plans and in the business plans of its sponsored bodies; and the devolved administrations should be encouraged to do likewise.””" For all the reasons that I have mentioned concerning the cross-cutting nature of heritage, we recommended that"““DCMS should also establish an inter-departmental committee on archaeology, at ministerial level, chaired by the DCMS and including the Office of Deputy Prime Minister””—" now the Department for Communities and Local Government—"““the Department for Education and Science and the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs””." We also recommended that"““This committee should meet at least twice a year and minutes of its discussions should be published. This committee should be serviced by a strengthened team to provide policy advice at the DCMS””." Too often, we found in our interviews with civil servants that one Department did not know what the other was doing, and Departments were often not clear about the extent of their responsibilities regarding heritage, planning, preservation and site listing. We also pointed out that"““There is an urgent need to improve pay and conditions for employment in field archaeology so that they are commensurate with graduate entry level in allied professions such as local authority planning officers, civil engineers and university lecturers.””" The problem is that the vast majority of archaeology in this country is not led by universities, as it used to be, or by local museums with adequate funding, but development-led. It is rescue archaeology, simply because developers have to pay in order to develop a site and usually do so at the lowest possible price, for understandable commercial reasons. Are we actually getting a full record of some of the sites that are going under concrete and will be lost for ever? We need to consider how best to record some of those important sites before foot upon foot of concrete or tarmac is poured upon them. A third recommendation from the report is that"““Sites and Monuments Records… should be made statutory with additional funding from central Government to ensure that they meet a minimum standard of content and service delivery. Public accessibility should be improved, and recognition of the community and educational values of SMRs must be included in their development. The national, regional and local SMRs need to be reviewed to streamline the infrastructure.””" The problem is that we have very sketchy sites and monuments records throughout the country. We desperately need to know what we are dealing with and what we have got before it disappears for good. I would like to put in a plea for one of the most successful schemes in archaeology in the past few years—the portable antiquities scheme, with which the Minister is very familiar, having been at the British Museum for the launch of the latest report last year. He has been very supportive of the scheme. Since its introduction in 2003, the portable antiquities scheme has given rise to more than 245,000 finds, which have been recorded by the scheme’s find liaison officers. I pay tribute to Liz Andrews-Wilson, who is the finds liaison officer for Sussex, covering the counties of East Sussex and West Sussex, as well as Brighton and Hove. She has done a fantastic job with limited resources. Many previously unknown archaeological sites have come to light because of the work of the scheme, including a prehistoric henge monument in Kent, Anglo-Saxon cemetery sites in Norfolk, and Cumbria’s first Viking-age inhumation cemetery. Many important archaeological finds reported through the scheme have been acquired by museums, including the fantastic Ringlemere gold cup and the Staffordshire Moorlands pan, inscribed with the names of forts on Hadrian’s Wall. To date, all historic environment records have signed a protocol to have full access to the portable antiquities scheme data. A code of practice for responsible metal-detecting has been endorsed by all key stakeholders; 55,000 copies of advice for finders of archaeological objects have been distributed; 1,073 talks have been given about the scheme; 1,187 find days were organised by the scheme in the past three years, which were attended by more than 45,000 people, many of them young people; 47 per cent. of the finders are from socio-economic groups C2, D and E, which compares favourably with the figures for museum visitors, with a particular emphasis on children; and 128 people have worked as volunteers. The scheme is fantastic and we should have had it before now. Sitting suspended for Divisions in the House. On resuming—