Via City Comforts Blog I came across this story about the reconstruction of a Roman Villa in Hampshire. Given its origins in the Adam Smith Institute I confess that my first instinct was to dismiss it as just another anti-government anti-regulation rant - especially since any planning application would have been dealt with not by the County Council at whom the finger is pointed but by the relevant District Council. If you are going to make your case about bureaucratic behaviour stick, then you pretty obviously need to finger the right one!
I'm also pretty sure that Hampshire County Council employ some pretty good archaeologists in their own right. So I'm not convinced this isn't actually a spat amongst archaeologists.
-- and yet, and yet...
Over 30 years as a local government planner I have seen other equal idiocies from time to time - not all planning based. I believe however this has more to do with the mind set of people who enjoy working in regulatory functions - the classic bureaucrats. While not everyone in local or even national government is of the same bureaucratic tendency as the Adam Smith Insitute would have you believe, there are enough of them to occasionally make life difficult. But have you ever tried to get a straight answer from an insurance company?
There are too many horror stories put about by the likes of the ASI to take things at face value - look for example at some of the ludicrous Euro-myths - do you remember the so-called straight banana?
In the end. I agree with David Sucher - I want to see the paperwork.
