Ivory Bill (Second sitting)

Luke Pollard Excerpts

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

[Anna Turley]

Q Apologies—I have my back to colleagues when I am facing this way. My final question is a very practical one. How many members of staff do you have in your teams, and how many cases have you taken through in the past year?

Grant Miller: Border Force has a team of 10, and last year was our best seizing year. It was not good for civil society. In excess of 1,000 seizures were delivered during the year, across all commodities.

Chief Inspector Hubble: I have a team of 12. I have four investigative support officers working on the ground, supporting police forces, two analysts, three intelligence officers, one indexer and an office manager. I do not have the figures to hand for how many investigations we have been involved in, but every seizure that comes from Border Force will come to us. We also work across six of the UK wildlife crime priority areas. CITES is one of those priority areas, but we have a significant remit outside CITES, looking at domestic wildlife. Bats, badgers, bird of prey persecution, freshwater pearl mussels and poaching all sit within UK strategic priorities at the moment, and our work is split between all those areas.

[Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)]

Q I think people watching this at home will be utterly amazed that there are only 10 and 12 people in your organisations fighting this, given the huge impact you are having, and that the funding for such small organisations after 2020 is still in doubt. I want to ask a question about how you are going to work with the regulator on this, but an awful lot of people will be amazed at the work you do, so I want to thank you for that.

The Government have said that the Office for Product Safety and Standards will be the responsible regulator. How do you see your respective organisations interacting with that new regulator in this respect?

Grant Miller: We would look to engage with it very early on. In the UK, we have a body called the CITES priority delivery group, which brings together all the actors involved in this, and we would certainly look to invite it to sit on that. The contribution it can make is through intelligence. If it identifies goods that may be imported or exported, it must get that intelligence to us to enable us to target better at the border. Having another organisation involved in the fight adds more strength. We are looking at developing our productive relationship with it.

Chief Inspector Hubble: We would be keen to establish protocols very early on. The Bill gives it the authority to inspect premises and apply for search warrants. We are keen to ensure its activities do not jeopardise ongoing enforcement operations, so it is key that we all link together to ensure that, if we are looking at the same people, we have a targeted, focused approach to dealing with them.

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs Latham]

Q I am sure that is something the Minister will look at.

Hartwig Fischer: I would like to corroborate that. Lending is part of our key mission. We hold these collections for the public and share them as widely as possible. It is also part of our mission as national museums to project British values across the globe by engaging with other institutions by sharing knowledge and heritage. All our museums—ICOM museums included—are bound by an extremely strict code of ethics. Any museum dealing with another institution is bound to check the ethical validity of the other institution. To the best of my knowledge, all museums do that. Again, you have a number of codes and procedures in place to make sure that there is no breach. The fact that museums rank among those public institutions that enjoy the highest trust is evidence that this has worked and is reliable.

[Luke Pollard]

Q Subsection (5) of clause 9, which deals with acquisitions by qualifying museums, provides that

“‘ivory item’ means—

(a) an item made of ivory, or

(b) an item that has ivory in it,

but does not include an item consisting only of unworked ivory”.

Can you help me understand how many of your collections include unworked ivory in this respect? Do you think that exemption is appropriate, or does it actually cover a much larger section of items in museum collections?

Anthony Misquitta: I do not think we are concerned by that. As a museum of art and design, we are not interested in unworked ivory; we are interested in worked ivory.

Dr Boström: That does not really pertain to us, no.

Anthony Misquitta: We are not worried by that distinction, because we work only in highly crafted art and design.

Hartwig Fischer: However, among the national museums is the Natural History Museum, which is one of the grandest and most important of its kind in the world, and it might have—it probably does—unworked ivory as part of its documentation of natural history. So yes, it is likely that our museums have only ivory that has been worked—carved, incised or what have you—but it might very well be that the Natural History Museum, in living up to its purpose and mission, has unworked ivory in its collections.

[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?