Historic England: "Not so Many, and What Can we Do?"

There was an online heritage seminar and it was suggested I might like to register to watch Mark Harrison, Head of Heritage Crime Strategy, Historic England. I said I was not going to because... blood pressure. But I submitted a question through a HA member 

I think we should ask the head of Heritage Crime Strategy about police estimates of the discovery rate of illegal metal detecting given that latest estimates are that there are 27000 active detectorists and they now frequently report they cannot get permission from any of the farmers they approach, what sort of police resources would there have to be to deal with the scale of effect?

HA reported "the presentation was pretty well as much as you'd predict/expect" and "one of my questions was chosen for discussion. Sadly, not Paul's one!" Surprise there, eh? Inevitably, even this "was turned around to state that only a 'small minority' of detectorists are nighthawks/thieves".

A small minority, eh? On what evidence? Let it be said that just 4%* of 27000 is 1080 detectorists who could potentially be going out even once a week... We are talking about the possibility that several thousand sites are being damaged each year, even if such a number only targets just three sites each (the number a group of men arrested in the UK a few months ago were reputed to have 'done' - no word to date of any charges brought).

It seems to me that the "strategy" is to wring hands that there are not the resources to place brightly coloured police cars with flashing lights and coppers camouflaged in hi-vis clothing on country roads to catch nighthawks in flagrente. That's a good way of not having to actually create a strategy. 

It seems to me that an obvious strategy would be to create a permit system, anyone caught out metal detecting without the permit, and signed agreement from the landowner to be on that land at that time, gets taken back to the station for questioning. Secondly, there should be spot checks on eBay sellers of artefacts, requiring them to present adequate documentation of provenance and title.

That's what Historic England's strategy should be, not to say "no can do, and there's not many of them anyway". As for those numbers, the Nighthawking Report was a bit of a cop-out (as I explained on my blog at the time) and more importantly written eleven years ago. The situation in artefact hunting in the UK eleven years ago was totally different. Then, most people had personal contracts with landowners. Now huge numbers of them are finding it so difficult to get onto land that they are having to pay to access it. One pay-to-dig commercial entity facilitating that has over 13000 followers, half the detectorists in England and Wales. Tell us that all metal detectorists that want land and have not got a "farmer" of their own, are now paying all that money each year. 

*The conventional estimate of the proportion of society that are sociopaths. Not all sociopaths are criminals, but not all criminals are sociopaths.