Portable Antiquities Outreach for the 99.5% Who Pay For It Too?

If they answered this question about the advert for a post as FLO for Somerset, Devon and Dorset honestly, it would be quite revealing:

Paul Barford @PortantIssues ·24 min W odpowiedzi do @JonaEFC @TRegistrars i @findsorguk
There are 2.53 million members of the public in those three counties, can the job of outreach on portable antiquities issues to them be done by avoiding contact with the c. 0.5% who are metal detectorists engaged in Collection-driven exploitation of the archaeological record?

of course nobody who knows Bloomsbury believes that the question stands a snowball in Hell's chance of getting any kind of a proper answer. The answer is of course 'yes', if we take the stated aims of the PAS to be what is written. The point is that what the PAS says it does, and what the PAS actually mainly does are two different things entirely. And current estimates are that it really is 0.5% of the population* that are despoiling the archaeological heritage of the other 99.5% for personal entertainment and gain.

*(pop. EandW = 56mln, 1% would be 560k, 0.1% is 5600 people, and current estimates are that there are 27k of the blighters - make it a smaller estimate and the percentage drops further).