Ivory Bill

Duke of Wellington Excerpts

Monday 10th September 2018 Lords Chamber

I hope that the Minister would thus accept that, in order to ascertain the proportion of ivory in an object, it should not be necessary for anyone even to consider carrying out any act that could run the risk of irreversibly damaging it. It should be accepted that this should apply to both the owner and any officer checking their calculations. This could mean that the actual proportion of ivory and the readily measurable proportion sometimes differ, but I see no reason why this should present a problem.

[The Duke of Wellington (Con)]

My Lords, when I spoke earlier on Amendment 5, I meant to declare an interest in that my family’s collection of works of art contains many objects containing ivory. That is true of all historic collections. In a sense, it is a non-interest because neither my family nor I have any intention to sell these objects, so I have no direct financial interest in the outcome of the Bill.

However, I would like to comment in some detail on Amendment 17, moved by the noble Lord, Lord Cormack. The Government have accepted that portrait miniatures are a definable category and should be treated separately, as they are in the Bill, but I cannot understand why they have been so precise on the definition of the size. This morning, I went to look at a miniature in our collection that is considerably more than 320 square centimetres in size. In any event, as we know, all portrait miniatures are really valued by the quality of the painting or identity of the sitter, rather than the very limited amount of ivory on which it is painted.