nigelswift wrote:
There was a plan a while back to put monetary values on heritage assets for accounting purposes. It never made much sense but maybe if councillors were made personally responsible for any diminution in the value of public assets that their decisions caused they'd have less of a tendency to ignore professional advice.
This is a scary thought though - although I doubt any council would want to fork out the presumably enormous amount for the diminution in value of say, knocking down Stonehenge, there would surely be those who would see the "penalty" being more than made up for by the "reward" if the site in question was lesser known and therefore less "valuable".
We already see examples in industry, where companies flout environmental laws and restrictions because they know that the profit they will make will far outweigh the laughable fine likely to be imposed for breaching those restrictions.
If a council found a site for a huge new housing estate to meet their housing targets and the only thing getting in the way was an "obscure" round barrow, for example, with a low theoretical monetary value, you can see which it would go. If you start to list things by reference to "value" it's the lesser known sites that will inevitably suffer.
Another (perhaps poor!) analogy is with endangered animal species. It is good that WWF, etc recognise that species are endangered and therefore should be protected. However, they now publish "league tables" on endangered-ness (I'm sure it's a word). In practical terms, a species is either endangered or it isn't. Oh, this one's not very endangered, it's only at number 41 in the chart, let's not worry about it. Perhaps I'm over simplifying, but I hate the way that everything has to be quantified and listed in some kind of chart rundown and subjected to the popular vote. Like those stupid programmes you get "1001 best ever Christmas soap deaths" or whatever.
Sorry, I am now ranting and getting further off topic! ;-)
Anyway, in the next weekly phone vote I'm going to vote for Tregeseal, because that Avebury's just a show-off.
