development control

Most forms of property development and material changes to land use need approval from a local or national government body responsible for spatial planning. This process is known as development control. The determination of applications and the granting of permission increasingly includes consideration of the archaeological implications of proposals. Where permission for development is granted, a condition can be imposed through the planning system which requires the developer to undertake, at their own expense, an agreed mitigation strategy that may variously involve the preservation or excavation of archaeological remains, or a combination of the two. As such, this approach provides a variant on the widely applied principle of environmental protection in which ‘the polluter pays’ for any damage done to the environment.