Ivory Bill (Second sitting)

Baroness Hayman of Ullock Excerpts

Committee Debate: 2nd sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 12th June 2018 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

We will now hear oral evidence from the National Wildlife Crime Unit and the CITES Border Force team at Heathrow. We have until 2.15 pm for this third panel. The air conditioning does not appear to be working so well today, so if people want to take their jackets off, feel free to do so. For the record, will the witnesses introduce themselves?

Grant Miller: I am Grant Miller, senior officer with the Border Force based at Heathrow, leading the CITES team that enforces the UK’s obligation to the convention.

Chief Inspector Hubble: I am Chief Inspector Lou Hubble, head of the UK National Wildlife Crime Unit. We work with police forces throughout the UK, supporting them in enforcement. We also collate and disseminate intelligence throughout the UK and internationally in relation to wildlife trade.

[Sue Hayman (Workington) (Lab)]

Q 57 How do the two different roles that you have interact, and how do the two organisations work? How are your resources at the moment? Do you have sufficient resources should the Bill become law? Would you need any further training or resources, and what impact would that have on your current roles?

Grant Miller: Our roles are quite distinct, which allows us to work hand in glove. The Border Force role is to disrupt the illegal trade—import/export—and trans-shipment of ivory through the UK. Our focus is largely on the export of our historically held ivory, which is traded over online auction houses and is then shipped predominantly to China and Hong Kong, but there is an emerging market in Vietnam for those goods as well. Border Force no longer has an investigation function; we hand all our intelligence from investigations to the National Wildlife Crime Unit with a view to it investigating those offences. So they are very much clear roles that allow us to work in partnership.

With regard to resources in Border Force, we have a dedicated unit that has been established for 30 years now and a team that is regarded as probably one of the best in the world at enforcing controls against the illegal wildlife trade. It is a team of 10 staff with national responsibility. We are, however, supported by every other uniformed Border Force officer, who has a basic level of skill in being able to identify animal and plant products.

Like every law enforcement manager, we could always use more resources and could always deliver more. However, what a small, highly focused team with clear objectives gives us is an easily moveable unit to actually address the changing risk. It allows us to be a lot more dynamic in addressing the risk and very flexible in moving from postal to air to maritime environments. At the moment, against the Border Force control strategy, our resourcing is adequate to control the threat.

Chief Inspector Hubble: When Border Force makes seizures of items being exported from the UK, it passes that intelligence to us. We collate that intelligence, develop it and research it to look at the number of items that people might be buying, selling or trading. We look at their associates. We try to map a network of people that they are linked in with, and ultimately we produce an intelligence package that goes out to a police force in the area where the person is committing the offences.

We have four officers who provide an investigative function to support police forces on the ground, and they work with police officers throughout the investigation: taking statements from witnesses, linking in with experts, compiling prosecution files, assisting with search warrants, and attending court to provide evidence. Due to our limited resource, we have to be really selective in what we deal with, so the number of investigations that we get where people are trading at a lower level would generally be sent to local policing to deal with. As a national unit, our focus has to be on those who are trading more and more products. Ultimately, that is where we can make a difference, linking in with the bigger players and those trading internationally.

One seizure by Border Force can result in months and months of investigation for us, and we can compile hundreds of intelligence logs from that one investigation. At the moment, we struggle to disseminate all that intelligence back out to Border Force, to close that loop, because we just do not have the resource to develop that. We have to be selective in what we deal with, but we certainly support Border Force in the work we all do on a day-to-day basis, and we welcome the introduction of the Bill.

[Henry Smith (Crawley) (Con)]

Q There are other jurisdictions around the world where there have been ivory bans. What sort of best practice do you feel can be gleaned from those other places—the United States perhaps most notably? What lessons do you think we can learn and apply when this legislation is passed for the UK?

Grant Miller: Chief Inspector Hubble and I were fortunate last year to do a training mission in South Africa for seven sub-Saharan Africans, in conjunction with the Chinese CITES management authority. During that workshop, the Chinese presented their comparative interpretation of the US ban and the Chinese ban and of the impact of these. It became evident that their view was that the Chinese ban was far more robust and had delivered closure of the trade. They felt that the US ban had left so many exemptions that the trade was allowed to continue despite there being a ban. If you accept their argument, we would like to see enforcement having to allow as few exemptions as possible so that the ban is, in reality, a ban on the ivory.

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[Luke Pollard]

Q On that point, one of the areas the Bill Committee is looking at is whether the scope should include elephant ivory or just ivory. When it comes to your enforcement activities, if the scope were to include other forms of ivory—walrus, narwhal, sperm whale, and such types—does that fundamentally change the quantum of the task that you and the new regulator have to carry out? Is it a huge amount of work? How would you categorise the additional activities that extending the scope would mean for your work?

Grant Miller: I do not think there would be a great expansion for us. Many of the species that you could be looking at, for example, hippopotamus, etc., are already listed on CITES. If we were to see them on import or export and there were no permits, our action would still be the same to seize and refer.

If mammoth ivory or warthog, that have been mentioned, are brought in, we have the ability to detect them, but we are not taking any seizure action. We are almost doing half of it. We are detecting it, but we are not then building the case and making the referral. I think the increase in work would be marginal for us at the border.

Chief Inspector Hubble: The role of policing throughout the UK is to uphold and enforce the law and deal with those who break it and we will continue to do that. From an intelligence perspective, we currently do not have any evidence to suggest that the trade around those other species is of significant number to warrant anything. We have to look at priority species that we deal with. In CITES, we have a number of priority species that we look at that have been raised there either from a conservation perspective or from a volume crime perspective. We would have to be intelligence-led and guided by scientific authorities before we would be able to put them on the Bill, because we have to be intelligence-led as a police unit.

[Sue Hayman]

Q I want to come back to the internet because it is a big challenge. Assuming the Bill goes through, and I see no reason why it should not, the situation will only get worse with illegal trade on the internet. We had a quick look on eBay and the number of items that just pop up is staggering. As you said, the descriptions were “bovine bone”, “ivory coloured”, “resin” and all sorts of things. When you look at them, I would worry that they were really ivory.

I do not know how we tackle this. This may sound naïve, but I do not know the answers. Do you have the ability to do “stop and search” random checks on items being sold from eBay, for example? Is that something that the police can do? If you looked at something and thought it was ivory, would you have the power to go in and check it?

Chief Inspector Hubble: If the information is in the public domain and the item is being openly sold on eBay, we can take screenshots, get details of the seller of these items and our intelligence function would do some research with eBay to look at other items that they have bought and sold. We would start to build that intelligence package with a view to going out to police forces to get some enforcement action taken.

[Sue Hayman]

Q With that in mind, would it be useful to have some sort of legal responsibility on website owners to ensure to the best of their ability that they were not selling illegal products? Is that a possibility? I am trying to think about ways in which we could potentially tackle this.

Chief Inspector Hubble: The Bill provides for an offence of facilitating.

[Sue Hayman]

Q Could that be made stronger to enable you to do your job better?

Chief Inspector Hubble: The approach to eBay initially got ivory removed as a category. People are now selling it as all the things that you have just looked at, and eBay will argue that it has too many items to police each one of them. It has a legal framework in place and anybody who tries to take eBay to court for facilitating an offence under the Bill is a braver person than I am.

[Sue Hayman]

Q Does eBay have some sort of contract with its sellers to say that sellers should confirm that what they are selling is not illegal? I do not know. I am just chucking out questions.

Chief Inspector Hubble: I do not know.

[Sue Hayman]

Q I wonder if that is something you could look into. Where do you put the burden of proof? Is it possible to get internet sellers to sign up to a contract?

Chief Inspector Hubble: We would certainly welcome better self-policing and self-regulating by online auction houses with some responsibility on them for the items that they are making money from the sale of. I do not know how we do that.

[Sue Hayman]

Thank you, I am just chucking out thoughts.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (David Rutley)]

Q I join members of the Committee in thanking you and your teams for the work you are doing and also for the way in which you are leveraging the rest of the Border Force or the wider police force available to tackle this crime—we are very grateful.

To go back to the regulator for a minute though, do you both agree that having the regulator in place will help you with your work, because it will help to raise awareness of the new regime that will come into place, and because it will work with the antiques sector and musicians to help to improve compliance and assess compliance in future? Would that help you with your work?

Grant Miller: It would certainly help us. We have found the antiques trade to be very receptive. We have delivered training sessions to it on the rules and regulations, and generally, the larger auction houses have been keen to work with us and to drive the illegal trade out of their supply chain. An increased resource—another body—actually going round and delivering a prevention message, and helping and enabling an understanding of the controls, will assist us, but an awful lot of the illegal trade at the moment sits outwith the regular auction houses. It is private individuals who are sourcing ivory from car boots, house clearances and so on, and that illegal trade will continue. They have no intention of complying with any rules or regulations, so that market will continue for us to police.

Chief Inspector Hubble: From an enforcement perspective, we echo those thoughts about working with auction houses. We are regularly contacted by people within the industry for advice—for them to satisfy themselves that they are complying. Although it is good to raise awareness of an issue, ultimately that may result in increased reporting of it. Once the Bill comes into force, if a member of the public sees something on sale that they think is ivory, inevitably they will report it, which comes back to the issue of resourcing and how we deal with the potential increase in the volume of crimes that we will have coming in to us.

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[Dr Cameron]

Q I understand that, but if you can get an extra one for losing one, is there potential for extra ones to arrive in the system somewhere?

Anthony Browne: One would have to ask the people who administered that, but I do not think the provisions in the Bill are weak. They should be workable, just like issuing any paperwork.

Mark Dodgson: The certificates are in respect of the most distinguished objects. They are all unique, and they are not likely to be easily muddled up with something else. If the concern is that they could be mixed up with other objects and used for other objects, I think that is unlikely.

Anthony Browne: If I may, I will add something to this. Certification is straightforward, because you are dealing with objects that are unique, rare and important, so there are not likely to be lots of them. I do have some concerns with the registration requirement for the de minimis objects. There is a sort of Catch-22 built into the de minimis. The Government have opted for 10% by volume. We argued for a higher percentage, in common with other countries, but the Government took that decision—so be it.

What the registration of objects will mean is this. There are quite a number of common or garden, utilitarian objects—many of your constituents probably own them if there has been a death and the house has been cleared—with minute amounts of ivory in them. They are by no means unique objects: they are Victorian or Georgian chests of drawers with tiny ivory lock holes and that sort of thing. There is no indication as yet what the cost of registration will be—one of you asked about that—but it could make selling such things completely uneconomical. The managing director of Lyon & Turnbull in Edinburgh sent me an email making that point. They are frequently asked to clear out estates when people are downsizing or moving house.

In the future, families who want to sell such things will be faced with two options. If there is something that looks like a small bit of ivory, it falls within this Bill, although it is well under the de minimis. If the cost of registration is more than negligible, the family is very unlikely to want to do that as it will simply not be economical, particularly as they do not know whether the object will sell. It could lead to an awful lot of objects with small amounts of ivory, which are reusable and recyclable and can be used again instead of buying new furniture, ending up in landfill because people cannot register them because the cost is too great. Even if they do register them, they are by no means unique, so what will the register do to help? I do not see how the register helps with a chest of drawers that looks identical to thousands of its cousins. Our concept was always that if an object is below the de minimis, it should be saleable—straightforward. If you sell something above the de minimis because you get it wrong, you are liable to criminal or civil prosecution, which is as it should be.

The registration of de minimis will do two things. You will simply deter people from registering, and then these objects will be destroyed or mutilated, as people try to hack the bits of ivory off—what is the point of that?—or they will just end up in landfill. I do not think this is a sensible aim. I wonder whether the Committee could look at this again. I do not think it would weaken the Bill in any shape or form. It would still be very easy to police, as it is a very low de minimis, and it will be completely apparent whether an object contains more or less than 10%. The penalties exist, and so on and so forth. It will prevent a lot of things that can usefully be used again or bought by the next generation from being used in that way. I do not think doing this will undermine the objective of the Bill at all. I just suggest that as a point that has been made to me.

[Sue Hayman]

Q I was going to ask whether any of you have concerns about the de minimis requirement—whether we need further clarification of that, whether you had looked at how the volume of ivory is measured, and whether the Secretary of State should set the measurement. Do you measure it now, and is there is a best practice way of doing it? We do not want items to be calculated slightly wrongly and to fall into the criminal section just because there are different ways of measuring volume. I just want to hear your thoughts about that.

Anthony Browne: Yes, I quite agree. I think the 10% means that it is pretty straightforward, but because of the penalties people will always err on the side of caution. We were very pleased that the Government chose volume, rather than weight, which is notoriously impossible to judge—volume is a sensible way of approaching it. As I said at the beginning, we think 10% is rather low, but we live in the real world. I do not think 10% by volume will be impossible, but people will err on the side of caution, so I would have thought that you will probably not get people rubbing up against the maximum and risking criminal penalties.

Mark Dodgson: Members of the British Antique Dealers’ Association were quite surprised at the 10% and the way it was set. We could not quite see from the documentation in the consultation why 10% had been chosen, versus perhaps 30% or 40%. Just so that you are aware, because the 10% is proposed to be set in that way, items such as a silver teapot—this is a Georgian silver teapot with an original ivory handle—

[The Chair]

Order. Although this sitting is being televised, it is not particularly regular for Hansard to have to describe artefacts. Given that this is perhaps a unique circumstance, could you briefly describe it for the record?

Mark Dodgson: Yes, I am showing an image of a silver teapot with an ivory handle. Sorry, Chairman. The point is to make it clear that this is the type of object that, set at 10%, would fall above the de minimis. It would be fairly straightforward to identify that as being more than 10%. My members are very concerned that the only other exemption that the teapot could attempt to meet would be the clause 2 exemption. The query among our membership is whether objects of that nature would actually meet the clause 2 requirements.

On the point about estimating the proportion of ivory, 10% for some items is all right. For inlaid objects it falls right in the middle of a series of smaller objects with ivory inlay, such as Indian Vizagapatam boxes and so on. It would be quite difficult for dealers to work out which side of the 10% they are on.

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[Kerry McCarthy]

That is interesting. Thank you.

[Sue Hayman]

Q There is obviously talk about prescribed institutions and qualifying museums and there has also been talk of a register of exempted items. The Secretary of State will keep a list of those registered or qualifying museums and prescribed institutions. If an institution is found to have been breaking the law, how do you see that being managed within your industry? Should the Secretary of State be able to take them off the register? Should further criminal action be taken? How would the industry look at policing itself within that category?

Hartwig Fischer: I would be very surprised if any of those institutions breached the law. We have extremely strict procedures in place for due diligence on provenance. Before any object enters our collection, it goes through many filters and is closely monitored. My understanding is that it would be exceedingly difficult for any of these institutions to do this. It is unlikely that something like this would happen inadvertently. It would be most exceptional for something like this to happen. I am very confident that these institutions are extremely conscientious when it comes to acquiring objects.

Anthony Misquitta: There is a very strict accreditation regime for museums in this country. Accreditation is by Arts Council England. Where a museum falls foul of those very strict rules, it loses its accreditation and that is catastrophic. It loses its Government indemnity scheme, it is unable to loan to or receive loans from other museums, and its charitable status is thrown into jeopardy. There are a number of checks and balances in the accreditation regime.

I will not say that museums never break the rules, because it is a very tough climate for museums—not the likes of the museums before you, but it is a difficult period for regional museums. Sometimes they are faced with the stark option of selling an item or closing, for example. They might sell an item and run the risk of losing their accreditation, but it is not something that they would do lightly and it is devastating if they do.

It may be necessary for the Arts Council to think about adding reference to this legislation to its accreditation tests.

[Sue Hayman]

Q So would that be the most sensible way to go forward be to bring the legislation into the Arts Council accreditation system?

Anthony Misquitta: I think so. I am talking off the top of my head, but that is a possible answer.

[Sue Hayman]

Q Would that cover galleries as well? Does the Arts Council accredit galleries? Yes, they are nodding at the back. Thank you very much.

[Trudy Harrison]

Q Do you have any concerns about differences of opinion between the expert assessors in assessing whether something would be exempt or not?

Dr Boström: According to the criteria that are set out here?

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[David Rutley]

Q You have done a lot of work to explain that museums do not get involved in a huge number of sales, and perhaps get involved in a very small number of purchases. What I was talking about—I should have been clearer—was the rare and most important items that you and institutions like you help to certify. Do you anticipate large volumes or small volumes? What volumes do you think will qualify under the definition of rare and most important?

Hartwig Fischer: I am personally not in a position to answer that question, I am afraid, because I do not have a sufficiently deep and detailed overview of what is happening in the trade. We see from the museum side that a very small quantity of objects qualify to enter the museum. When it comes to museums and what we see generally, even following what is happening in auctions, we are talking about small quantities. We are not talking about thousands of objects. The material that is historically relevant and significant is very limited.

Dr Boström: If one were to talk about taste in ivory carving and collecting, we always associate the working of it more with the 17th and 18th centuries, and the collectors with the end of the 19th century. It is not foremost in collecting practices or trends.

Hartwig Fischer: It remains to be seen what will actually come up for certification. One will have to react to the volume to see how best to deal and cope with it efficiently.

[Sue Hayman]

Q Earlier, you were talking about resources—there is obviously a certain amount of work that comes with this. You are clearly very large institutions, and you have a broad range of specialists and experts within your museums. What might the impact be on smaller museums that do not have such access to specialists? Will there be a cost implication for them?

Dr Boström: I imagine that, in parallel with the export licensing, even if objects were to come to a small museum or be associated with it, it will be devolved back to the major national museums—where many of the experts reside, because of a reduction of curatorial staff in our regional museums—to help them, in the way we do in other cases.

Hartwig Fischer: We have wide-ranging national partnership programmes in place. We work with 150 small and bigger institutions across the country. There is a well-established network of exchange, skill sharing and trust. We are confident that we will find a solution. We are engaged in helping museums that do not have the expertise to cope with these questions.

[Sue Hayman]

Thank you. That is very helpful.

[The Chair]

If there are no further questions from Members, I thank the witnesses for their evidence today.

Ordered, That further consideration be now adjourned.—(Mims Davies.)