Prepared and maintained by Cambridge Development Archaeologyfor development teams working across Cambridge and Cambridgeshire.
Sources, review dates and corrections →The planning position
Where development will damage archaeological remains, the planning system expects the applicant to record and understand them first, at the applicant's expense. That obligation is imposed through conditions on the permission, or occasionally through a planning obligation, and it runs with the permission rather than with any particular party.
There is no general public fund for this work on commercial schemes. Grant support exists only in narrow circumstances and should never be assumed in an appraisal.
Landowner, promoter or housebuilder
In practice the allocation is a commercial negotiation, and it depends on when the work is done.
- Pre-application assessment and evaluation is often funded by the promoter or option holder, because it de-risks the planning application
- Where a site is sold with permission, mitigation cost normally transfers to the purchaser and should be reflected in the land price
- On conditional contracts, who funds evaluation — and who owns the resulting reports — is worth expressing explicitly
- On serviced-parcel disposals, the party carrying out enabling works usually carries the archaeology with it
Where it sits in the build contract
Archaeology is enabling work. It belongs before or alongside groundworks, with its own scope, its own programme allowance and, wherever possible, direct appointment by the developer rather than nomination through the main contractor.
Direct appointment matters for two reasons. The archaeological obligation is owed to the planning authority, not to the contractor, so the developer needs an unbroken line to the specialist who discharges it. And where archaeology overruns, a direct appointment keeps the conversation about method and evidence rather than about preliminaries and delay claims.
Handling the uncertainty honestly
The reason archaeological cost causes friction is that nobody can fix it before the ground is tested. The professional response is to stage it: assess, evaluate, then scope mitigation against actual results, with a provisional sum carried until the evaluation report exists.
A fixed price for mitigation on an unevaluated site is a priced guess. It will either be padded against the worst case or exposed to variation the moment fieldwork disagrees with it. Neither serves the developer.
What we can tell you early
Given the site, the condition wording and the development stage, we can indicate the likely method, a realistic cost band and the programme window — and say clearly which parts remain uncertain until evaluation. That is normally enough to set an appraisal allowance and a contractual position.