Ivory Bill (Second sitting)

David Rutley Excerpts

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

[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.

[The Chair]

If there are no further questions from Members, I thank the witnesses for their evidence and we will move on to the next panel.

Examination of Witnesses

Anthony Browne, Mark Dodgson, Emma Rutherford, Paul McManus and David Webster gave evidence.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.

[David Rutley]

Q Thank you for your contributions today and for engaging so fully with the consultation. The EU is currently conducting its own consultation on banning ivory sales, and we expect to hear the results of that soon. Do you agree that it is right for the UK to have pressed ahead with its own approach first? What sense do you have from colleagues you work with in Europe about what they think the outcome of the EU consultation could be?

Anthony Browne: The sense I get, having talked to EU colleagues, is that they are arguing for a much less stringent ban than the Bill adopts. If that happens, there is no doubt that, as far as the decorative arts are concerned, markets in Europe will inevitably be more attractive. That is the inevitable consequence of legislating in this way. With regard to whether the UK’s lead will be followed by the European Union, you probably have a better idea than I do. I think there is no doubt, as the preamble and explanatory notes to the Bill say, that what is proposed is one of the most stringent restrictions anywhere in the world.

Mark Dodgson: From my experience, I too think that continental people in the trade would resist the level of restrictions suggested in the Bill. People need to be aware that on the continent, until recently, ivory tusks have been exported. Germany still has ivory workshops. We are already a long way ahead of those countries anyway.

David Webster: I was talking to some musician colleagues at a social dialogue in Brussels yesterday and shared with them the content of the Bill, and they seemed very impressed by it. Yes, we would hope that the UK’s lead would be followed. I spoke at the consultation conference last December on behalf of musical instruments, along with our colleagues from the International Federation of Musicians.

Paul McManus: Similarly, we have communicated with all the equivalent trade bodies around the world about where we are. Everyone in the musical instrument industry has been rather impressed by what the UK is proposing, as being pragmatic, sensible and proportional. We have nothing but praise for what has been done so far.

Emma Rutherford: For portrait miniatures, my colleagues in Europe just hope that they follow the UK’s lead and grant portrait miniatures an exemption.

[The Chair]

As there are no further questions, I thank the witnesses for their evidence. We will now move on to the next panel.

Examination of Witnesses

Hartwig Fischer, Dr Antonia Boström and Anthony Misquitta gave evidence.

--- Later in debate ---

[Luke Pollard]

Q Given that we hope that the trade in ivory will come to an end and that there will be less ivory available, might there be a greater desire among museums to have pieces of unworked ivory to demonstrate a historical connection, be it good or bad, with a region, an industry or a time period?

Hartwig Fischer: My hunch is that since 1975 there have been no purchases of unworked ivory, so I do not see any museum—any natural history museum or any museum of this kind—engaging in anything like this. These are historical holdings.

Dr Boström: Further to that, because they are historical holdings—as in the Pitt Rivers Museum or any of the famous university museums with natural and artistic objects—I imagine that there is enough in the existing public collections, across all museums, that, should it be necessary to display or interpret unworked ivory for an educational purpose, we do not have to go anywhere else for unworked ivory.

[David Rutley]

Q Thank you very much for your contributions today and to the consultation. Thank you in advance for the work you will do to make this come into effect with these very small exemptions. You have given Committee members a lot of assurance today, and you have explained your expertise and your confidence that you can use the criteria to determine the genuinely rare and most important objects. Can you help us understand better what that means, in terms of the likely volumes? On Second Reading, concerns were raised across the House about whether the regulations are tight enough. Can you help us understand what the likely volumes will be for these rare and very important items? By definition, I think we all assume that the quantities will be small, but it will be useful for you to say that, as experts, rather than for us to assume that.

Dr Boström: Are you talking about the volume of acquisitions, or the objects that might come to us?

[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.