§ Mr. OnslowTo ask the Secretary of State for the Environment what progress his Department is making with the management of underwater archaeological sites since taking over responsibility for administering the relevant sections of the Merchant Shipping Act 1894.
§ Mr. YeoThe Merchant Shipping Act 1894 remains the responsibility of my right hon. and learned Friend the Secretary of State for Transport, but in April this year my Department took over responsibility for the operation of the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973 in English waters.
Since then we have taken a number of steps to ensure that important underwater archaeological sites are adequately protected.
In May we moved quickly to protect a site in the Erme estuary, south Devon and have licensed archaeological work on that and a further eight protected sites this season.
Since the majority of protected sites were discovered by amateur divers, it is important that they should understand the basics of archaeology and to that end we have granted the Nautical Archaeology Society almost £30,000 in 1991–92, with similar levels likely in the following two years, to expand its training and education programme.
Protection can be effective only for known sites. We have therefore expanded the programme of our contractors, the archeological diving unit of St. Andrews university, to examine further sites which might merit protection and increased the resources of the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England for the preparation of a central record of historic wrecks, as proposed in the environment White Paper "This Common Inheritance".
My Department has also been working in conjunction with the joint nautical archaeology policy committee on an explanatory note for divers to remove misconceptions about the operations of the legislation affecting wrecks and a draft code of practice for seabed developers whose operations might affect archaeological sites.