Image (cc) The Portable Antiquities Scheme.
A series of written answers concerning the Portable Antiquities Scheme came out this week.
David Taylor (Labour) asked what redundancies are going to happen given that the finances were only going to ‘maintain the level of support’. The reply was that the Minister doesn’t know and it’s not the government’s problem.
Hwyel Williams (Plaid Cymru) asked how many Finds Liaison Officers cover Wales and what assessment has been made of their effectiveness. The answer is one, and as far as the Minister is concerned it seems that there’s no interest in how effective that officer is.
Lembit Öpik (Liberal Democrat) had a couple of pointed questions about the future. What would the funding be for the next three years? That hasn’t been decided yet, and it’s not a government matter. Given the current financial crisis the country’s in where cuts are being made across all research councils to bail out other problems it seems that long-term planning simply isn’t possible at the PAS. That does raise the question how on earth are the PAS going to plan for the future. Lembit Öpik also asked what discussions there had been about the scheme’s future with the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council. The answer seems to be “none really”.
David Jones (Conservative) asked how many archaeological finds have been recorded by the PAS in Wales, which means every major party in England and Wales has been taking an interest in the subject recently. Unusually that got a straight answer with no prevarication or qualifiers: 17,702. That’s interesting because with 321406 finds in total, that means that one eighteenth of all of the scheme’s finds are coming from an area served by just one of forty-nine officers. It’s not a fair comparison as a lot of borders material is handled by the neighbouring English officers, but it does show that the scheme really isn’t a position to make cutbacks. Add in the answer’s to Lembit Öpik’s questions and it’s clear that there isn’t even a target as to where things will be cut back to.
I’m still baffled. If you were to draw up a New Labour heritage scheme in a cynical bid for money, then the PAS is what you’d get. It’s local and national. It’s inclusive. It’s cheap and it’s multi-purpose. It’s as if Labour has been caught out by the success of their policies and the opposition parties could easily use the government’s disarray for cheap point scoring. Yet it has cross-party support because it has been a huge success. This comes out in the debate held recently on the 5th of March. At a time when it’s easy to hold politicians in contempt this debate shows that there are people from all parties who are capable of serious debate.
It was led by Mark Fisher (Labour) and I can’t help wishing he was Minister for Culture. A quick look on Wikipedia shows that he was Minister for the Arts briefly. If the written answers to Parliamentary questions are to be believed then he’s clearly much more well informed about the PAS than the current Minister. The debate wasn’t so much about how economies could be made but about how the current funding for the scheme is inadequate. Fisher notes:
Already, even at the present time, we have too few finds liaison officers, although the scheme operates well. There is only one finds liaison officer for the whole of the north-east—from Teeside up to the Scottish border—which is an area of incredible archeological importance and includes Hadrian’s wall and many other important sites. There is just one officer for that whole area.
The wall is important, but as he says there are other sites too. If I were to create a research project on Britishness then this is where I’d go to. This is one of the few places where the monasteries kept history alive in the Dark Ages. It bore the brunt of the Viking invasions. It’s been fought over for centuries by the Scots and the English. If you want to know what being British as opposed to English or Scottish means then this is the place to look.
Edward Vaizey (Conservative) has a similar tale from Oxfordshire. There’s no FLO for Oxfordshire at the moment due to the lack of budget beyond 2009, and no officer for Berkshire. The Thames Valley is possibly the closest thing Britannia had to civilisation in the Roman period. It was one of the major farming areas. Oxford was home to the Royalist cause in the Civil Wars. It has sites like the Rollright Stones reaching back into prehistory.
There’s also a nice bit from Tim Loughton (Conservative):
[I]n terms of it being right that there should be a review, will she acknowledge that the efficiencies in the scheme, which has produced, I think, a 73 per cent. increase in the finds recorded year on year, are absolutely phenomenal? In terms of bang for the taxpayer’s buck, this is an incredibly efficient scheme.
How strange is that? At a time when the political parties are all sniping at each other for points you have people from all sides wanting to put on record what a good job government-funded project is doing. When the opposition are telling you you’ve been hugely successful surely it’s time to take notice?
The problem is that the country seems to be in the grip of a severe financial crisis. It’s not just the PAS that’s falling under the axe. The Arts and Humanities Research Council has pulled the plug on its internet archive. It’s a signal that the UK is a no-go area for internet archiving, which could be a problem if you think that academics might be putting more work on the internet in the coming decade or so. The situation is even worse in Physics. There’s been a long-term crisis there which has become so normal that the government has slashed the Astronomy budget by another 25%. Say goodbye to Jodrell Bank.
The most depressing fact about all this isn’t simply the cuts, its that projects are getting cut because they are successful. I can see that Northern Rock had to be bailed out. The economic effect of leaving it to go to the wall would be disasterous, but it seems now that we’re celebrating and rewarding failure. A better example would be the Olympi©s* whose cost has grown from £3.4bn to £9.3bn thanks to financial management. This includes an extra £1.1bn recently pulled from the Lottery funds to be spent creating temporary venues where we can cheer on plucky British athletes as they just miss out on the medals thanks to years of under-investment in basic sports facilities.
Yes, the PAS was initially funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, which has lost its money.
*Bizarrely it’s possibly illegal to use the correct spelling because someone’s stolen a word from the English language. I could understand Olympic™ but copyright is simply ridiculous.
