Generally, the purposes of monitoring by the regional archaeological advisor on behalf of the Local Planning Authority, may be summarised as:

• To ensure the maintenance of archaeological standards (see Standards in British Archaeology issued by the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists).
• To ensure compliance with planning regulations and requirements.

• To ensure compliance with the brief provided by the archaeological advisor and/or the specification or project design submitted by the archaeological practitioner for the approval of the Local Planning Authority.
• To ensure the relevance of the further information gained by the work to the on-going planning process.
• To ensure that any recommendations made by the archaeological practitioner are reasonable in planning terms.
• To ensure that any further recommendations resulting from the work that are made by the Local Planning Authority (based on the advice of their archaeological advisors) are founded on detailed knowledge and are reasonable in planning terms.
• To help formulate, where required, an archaeological mitigation strategy, which could protect the archaeological resource whilst enabling the permitted development.

Monitoring is carried out by our Archaeological Planning Management team. Officers undertaking monitoring work will have appropriate experience and will be available to discuss any aspect of monitoring.

Monitoring will normally be undertaken at appropriate points during fieldwork and following the production of reports on the work. In the case of larger excavations monitoring of post-excavation work will continue until the archive has been deposited.

In order for monitoring to be undertaken a specification or project design should have been prepared by the archaeological practitioner and approved by our archaeological planning management team on behalf of the Local Planning Authority. Monitoring is therefore undertaken to ensure that the archaeological work meets the approved specification or project design for the work.