Wedgwood Museum

Joan Walley Excerpts

Tuesday 19th October 2010 Westminster Hall

[Tristram Hunt (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to raise the future of the Wedgwood museum. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Joan Walley) for joining me here, as well as the Minister, who has proved generous with his time and attention in this matter.

We are here to highlight one of the greatest cultural collections in England, and the threat to its future. On the southern edge of Stoke-on-Trent, in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Robert Flello), stands a museum dedicated to

“The People Who Have Made Objects of Great Beauty from the Soils of Staffordshire.”

In 2009, it won the £100,000 Art Fund prize for museums and galleries, and the judges praised it as a “brilliant snapshot”, highlighting the marriage of art, design, manufacturing and commerce. However, today the museum is under threat from a legal quagmire more akin to Jarndyce v. Jarndyce than any rational museums policy. What is more, the principle at stake in the dissolution of the collection could have major, damaging repercussions for museums across the UK.

The origins of the Wedgwood museum can be traced to Josiah Wedgwood himself—a former resident of what is now the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North. In 1774 he wrote:

“I have often wish’d I had saved a single specimen of all the new articles I have made, & would now give twenty times the original value for such a collection. I am now, from thinking, and talking a little more upon this subject...resolv’d to make a beginning.”

And so resolved, Wedgwood made a beginning on what is undoubtedly among the finest ceramics collections in the world, with some 8,000 objects on display, from black jasper Portland designs to bone china tea sets and Robert Adam-designed vases. The collection testifies both to Wedgwood’s genius and the company’s productivity.

[Joan Walley (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree, given the context of the debate and his reference to Josiah Wedgwood, that this debate is part of a wider debate about ceramics and the culture of the Potteries, and about the importance of finding a long-term solution for the Wedgwood institute in Burslem?

[Tristram Hunt]

I absolutely agree. As I hope to point out, the interrelationship between the past and the present is enormously important, drawing on history not simply for archaic reasons but as an economic and cultural motor for the city of Stoke-on-Trent and the county of Staffordshire. As my hon. Friend pointed out, the collection is as much commercial as aesthetic. We see in the museum guides to earthenware and creamware, and to jasper and basalt production.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tristram Hunt]

I am happy for the hon. Gentleman to say a few words, and I will canter through the outlines.

Wedgwood died in 1795, but his descendants, the Wedgwood family, dedicated their collections to the museum right through the 19th and 20th centuries. Indeed, collections from the Wedgwood family were donated right up to the last few years. It was always done as an act of social philanthropy, in the belief that the collection would be preserved for all future generations, in perpetuity. Wedgwood stands very much in line with the thinking of the Secretary of State, who recently announced:

“Philanthropy is central to our vision of a thriving cultural sector”,

and called for

“more individual acts of social responsibility”.

However, the museum goes far beyond telling the extraordinary life of Wedgwood, the manufacturer, agitator, internationalist and salesman. It describes the advent of industrialisation, the nature of the English enlightenment and how the French revolution and the struggle against slavery reverberated throughout the UK. For me and some of my colleagues, one of the most inspiring parts of the collection is the series of medallions stating:

“Am I not a man and a brother”,

celebrating Wedgwood’s involvement with the abolitionist cause.

The Wedgwood family and business have always had a keen sense of their place in history. The firm opened its first museum in 1906. By 1909, the museum catalogue was packed full of artefacts. In 1962 the family, with great prescience, aware that the Wedgwood family business was likely to go public, decided formally to separate the museum from the factory, specifically to prevent the museum from being used as a realisable asset by any future predator. Whatever financial difficulties were encountered by Wedgwood, any corporate owners could not sell the collection. Even in 2009, when Waterford Wedgwood entered administration, Deloitte, the administrator, could not touch the collection and sell it off to pay the many creditors.

The museum became a charitable trust in 1998, in order to secure funding for a new building to house the collection. The Heritage Lottery Fund generously contributed £5.86 million, resulting in a magnificent new museum which opened to the public in 2008, confident in the status of a charitable trust. Since then, unfortunately, an Alice in Wonderland legal situation of such absurdity has developed that it barely seems credible. In January 2009, Waterford Wedgwood, the pottery giant, went into administration. The company was bought by KPS, an American private equity firm, which managed to purchase the prize assets of Wedgwood, Royal Doulton and Waterford without taking on board any of the £134 million pension liability of the Wedgwood group pension fund. This was the initial cause of the problem.

Pensions legislation, introduced initially in 2005 and amended in April 2008, now means that the museum, a small charitable trust, is being held responsible for the £134 million shortfall in the Wedgwood companies’ pension plan, because five of the museum’s staff are among the Wedgwood group pension fund’s 7,000 members. We have the madness of a £60,000 pension liability being liable for £134 million of debts, with a priceless collection at risk. How can this be?

The museum staff are not employed by the insolvent Wedgwood firm, but by the entirely independent Wedgwood Museum Trust Ltd, a completely separate charitable company. The brand new museum, housing a 250-year-old collection, has not gone bankrupt, but it has gone into administration, because the Pension Protection Fund has made a claim on every penny of its assets.

To be fair to the PPF, it has acted intelligently through the process, as it seeks to find a solution. However, under the “last man standing” principle, the Wedgwood museum is still a solvent company: it is the last man standing, because five of its employees are in the same pension fund. The legislation might have had laudable aims in preventing large multinationals from hiding assets to reduce pension payouts, but somehow charities and trusts have fallen foul of its far-reaching tentacles.

In such a context, it is important to make it absolutely clear that even if the whole collection were sold, it would not meet even half the pension debt, and the 7,000 ex-employees would not receive any more pension income. The money would simply be swallowed up by the Pension Protection Fund. Loyal ex-Wedgwood employees know this and support our campaign to save the historic collection. They know from experience the hard work, craftsmanship and sheer excellence of design that went into producing many of the pieces in the collection. All the citizens of Stoke are immeasurably proud of the Wedgwood museum and will be devastated if it becomes a victim of poorly applied legislation and a pensions crisis.

[Joan Walley]

I simply want to put on record my thanks, and that of my constituents, to all those Wedgwood employees who, over the years, have made the collection what it is. It is absolutely essential that, when the Minister replies, he assures the people of Stoke-on-Trent that he will look at a plan B or at whatever is needed to ensure that we do not end up losing this most precious of museums.

[Tristram Hunt]

I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention and wholly concur with her.

The future of the Wedgwood museum collection now rests on a court decision expected in January—though it would be good to have some clarity on dates from the Minister—as to whether the collection is alienable. Former Wedgwood employees, local Stoke and Staffordshire enthusiasts, Wedgwood family members and leading historians, curators, artists and ceramicists are appalled by the situation. Sir Neil Cossons, chairman of the Royal College of Art, puts it well:

“If the court case goes against the museum it will not only be catastrophic for one of the finest museums in the country but blow a hole through all our assumptions about the inalienability of collections held by trusts.”

The case could have major implications for other museum trusts across the UK. Which museum linked to a pension deficit of a local authority, university or company might be in difficulties after a poor judgment?