COUNCIL CUTS PUT MORE ARCHAEOLOGISTS ON THE DOLE

'As councils put the finishing touches to their budgets this month, it looks like cuts will mean more archaeologists out of work.

In the last issue of The Digger, we reported that archaeologists at the Gloucester and the Essex local government units were under threat. As we go to press, the future of the Gloucester unit still looks far from certain, while at Essex it has been announced that 20 jobs are to go.

Gloucester council has just set its budget which includes GBP3 million worth of cuts in the coming year, despite extra funding of GBP214,000 secured from the government recently. The county council said that 'a range of services will suffer from restricted investment.'

Gloucester's plans to close its Folk Museum for 42 weeks a year and cut its archaeology unit to the bone caused a storm of protest. Before the budget was set, an insider told The Digger: 'The council is planning to sell off the unit building, stop contract fieldwork, resulting in the redundancy of fieldwork staff and leaving two planning archaeologists, and relocate remaining staff to the City Museum. The service will be focused purely on planning (although still expected to do watching briefs and training projects without fieldwork staff).' Two staff were lost last year. 'This is all being dressed up as 'improvements' to the Museum and Archaeology Service, the result of a strategic review of the service which started in March last year,' our source told us. 'Needless to say staff are at a loss to see how this all constitutes improvement.'

The Gloucester branch secretary of Unison, Phil Jones, told councillors that staff are sick of threats to their jobs. In a letter publicising the union’s 'Save our Heritage' campaign, he said that this was 'the third year in a row the Council has put museums and archaeology in the frame for cuts,' adding, 'Once again it is down to us, the service’s supporters, staff and unions to come to the defence of the service.'
More than 30 museum and archaeology workers with members of the public lobbied councillors and handed in an 800-signature petition calling for the plans to be dropped. One of the two former mayors who supported the petition, Derek Dobbins, said, 'We should not be closing our culture in this city, we should be exploiting it for our benefit.' The protest resulted in plans to close the Folk Museum being put temporarily on hold.

The title of Gloucester's corporate strategy is 'Proud of our past, building for the future,' yet it fails to mention either the museums or archaeology service once. In a response to a letter of protest from BAJR, Mary Smith, leader of the city council said: 'We did give the archaeology section a year to make themselves self funding, but unfortunately they did not manage to achieve that, and did not win the tenders they expected to win. That does not mean that we will stop doing the statutory duty we have to do in connection with planning applications.'

In Essex, the 20 archaeologist redundancies are part of 100 job cuts made across County Hall. Lord Hanningfield, the leader of the County Council, announced the redundancies following the biggest-ever spending shake-up in the authority's history. The Tory peer insisted the redundancies were 'unfortunate' but were part of a major new efficiency drive. He said that, 'We are able to bring in a much lower rise in Council Tax this year.'

Concern is also being expressed at the length of time Lancashire County Council has taken in reappointing its County Archaeologist post. Is this another attempt at saving money?

Web Links :

Lancashire County Council

Gloucester Archaeology Unit

Essex Archaeology Unit