36 C O N T E X T 1 1 7 : N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 0 Archaeological view The Big Society and heritage localism investigations of heritage assets and from the measures to mitigate the impact of development proposals on those assets’ significance (in line with PPS5 Planning for the historic environment). All of this will result in unemployed heritage officers, commercial heritage professionals increasingly scratching around for contracts and the historic environment becoming increasingly stressed by market-led regulation. Is this a pessimistic picture?Who knows, it may prove to be optimistic. Certainly there is to be a shift towards the private sector and with it a need for increased self-regulation of the commercial heritage professionals (a significant theme that the Southport Commission was musing on through last autumn). If the private sector can not adequately fill the void left in local government and English Heritage, can it be filled by the government’s much-vaunted Big Society and localism agenda? As briefly discussed in my earlier columns, our profession largely sprang from the voluntary sector, the community activists of the mid 20th century. SAVE, Rescue, the Georgian Society, Victorian Society, Twentieth Century Society and countless other Civic Trust, local history, archaeology and amenity groups came into being in response to the often brutalist and utilitarian regeneration of our towns and cities of the mid 20th-century.Without these localists, we would not have had much of the legislation, planning policies and other instruments that we use to manage the historic environment. We would never have had professional heritage officers in local planning authorities, who in turn provided work for the archaeological and historic buildings contractors. It is to an earlier big society and a wave of organic localism to which we owe our employment. In addition, community engagement with archaeological excavations, though largely passive, has its roots going back to the end Whether or not you believe that the government has no choice but to make the biggest cuts ever to the welfare state, or you believe the cuts to be motivated by an ideology that looks to see the market act as regulator, we know that the impacts aimed at the public sector will have significant and lasting repercussions for heritage managers on both sides of the public-private divide. Local authority heritage professionals, along with all their colleagues, have been bracing themselves for unprecedented cuts following the public spending review. Even before that date, the coalition government’s more gung-ho acolytes in council cabinets had swung their scythes into action. Sussex and Suffolk are looking to privatise all but a rump of their current services. Tens, even hundreds of millions of pounds are set to be taken from the budgets of councils such as Gloucestershire and Somerset. At the micro level, heritage officers feel more of the strain from senior officers and members to bend policy to breaking point and bow to the demands of the market. It is a grim winter, and is likely to last years. The government freely admits that current services will be significantly cut back, but quickly asserts that the private and voluntary sectors will be able to expand into the voids. For the heritage sector, it may well be the case that opportunities will arise for contractors and consultants to provide a cheaper (probably reduced) service in terms of planning advice to local planning authorities and that, where they survive, heritage officers will be confined to shaping policy, monitoring outcomes and penning outsourcing contracts. Certainly our private sector colleagues will have some chance to expand some of their operations, but the same level of service across planning authorities and English Heritage will not, even can not, be maintained. But our commercial friends will not be making a killing. The outfall from the spending review will lead to a reduction in opportunities, since a great deal of their work is triggered by the planning authorities’ requirements for pre-planning Clutch Clinic, Gloucester, community recording group National community heritage conference, Gloucester
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