In your place I would challenge them to produce the results of their assessment they created as a result of fulfilling last year their fifth aim (as reported on page nine of the last annual report).* Obviously such an assessment would have to include a proper figure for the number of finds found by detectorists annually to cost up how they are going to deal with it in the longer term. Obviously if these figures were released to the public expected to pay for it (and isn't it odd that such figures are not available over a year on from the completion of this aim?) then there would be no need for any others. Surely the public has a right to know how much the present government's indulgence and encouragement of domestic artefact hunting and collecting is going to cost them...Why don't the PAS release THEIR figures? Why?

As for:
> Look at the number of finds recorded, it is constantly increasing. Look at the
> number of research projects that this Scheme facilitates, it is increasing.
> Look at the number of eminent archaeologists using our data, its
> increasing.<
That TOTALLY misses the point of the HA counter. "We are not doing too well with the cheese (and we say your figures are speculative) but look what a lot of chalk we've got !" Is getting the chalk instead of the cheese what the PAS is instituted for? And what about mitigating the erosion of the archaeological resource (that's the "cheese")?

> I have not heard from you both a decent suggestion of how we can improve.
> Have you got any? Any at all?<
Well yes, actually the PAS jolly well has heard such positive (and achievable) suggestions, and not just from us about what we think could be done to improve the modus operandi of the PAS and its outreach... every single one of them was dismissed and ignored without further discussion. Then of course PAS closed their Forum to stop more being made there and more questions asked about real progress.

There are a number of ideas how the PAS could be doing a better job. Starting with "telling it like it blooming well is", as it seems to me that they are doing their best to avoid it (closing the PAS blog thread where someone was trying to get to the bottom of an odd discrepancy in "the figures" for example might be taken in that way mightn't it?).

Paul Barford

* For those that don’t know, the fifth aim was "To define the nature and scope of a scheme for recording portable antiquities in the longer term, to assess the likely costs and to identify resources to enable it to be put into practice.”