In the UK there is no national heritage service but there are many departments that deal with heritage. This post will be brief as this lecture dealt mainly with the UK system of heritage.
England alone has 19,347 scheduled monuments, 376,094 listed buildings, 1500 parks and gardens, 43 battlefields, 9027 conservation areas, and 404 English heritage properties to maintain under a budget that just was slashed. This makes people here in the heritage sector pretty pessimistic about their ability to properly take care of all of these.
Heritage is currently cared for in a tiered system that has regional, county, district, and perish levels. There is an Agriculture, Horticulture, and Forestry law that dictates that no subsoil work (like drainage), plowing, or tree planting can be done at these sites. Gardening is allowed as long as it doesn’t extend more than 300 millimeters below the surface.
Archaeological sites are considered fragile and non-renewable. However, there is no current law against metal detecting (a hobby in which the government still allows the finder to sell their finds and keep all the money for themselves) and government laws are proving to be somewhat toothless because of special interest groups.
These are just some of the problems that they face in the UK and are certainly some of the same problems that the countries we do archaeology face as well.
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