Revision of UK Artefact Collecting Code by Including the Tesco Clause

The latest from Heritage Action: ' Farmer Brown: They’re revising the detecting code at last! But will it be emasculated again?'

This week CBA Director Mike Heyworth chaired a meeting “to agree a revised metal detecting code”. Good. We farmers need a “Tesco clause” saying “show everything you intend to take home and get a receipt for it” (like millions of Tesco customers, including all detectorists, do all the time.) Which honest detectorist would object to that? And how could archaeologists oppose it (given that it would stop PAS’s database being infected with nighthawked items and/or false findspots). So the new code will be a litmus test of who controls Britain’s buried heritage, professionals or the rough wing of detecting. If a Tesco-like clause is inserted, it will be a step towards resource and landowner protection whereas if the code is emasculated, as happened to the original one, then the pressure from dishonest detectorists will have prevailed.

He then recalls the 15 “recording strikes” threatened by greedy artefact hunters when other reforms were proposed. They expose on the one hand what the revised Code should cover a and what the likely reaction to such suggestions would be from the ('we so much wannabe seen as') "responsible detectorists".