Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask His Majesty's Government whether they intend to have discussions with senior staff at the British Museum about returning the Mold Gold Cape to Wales.

The British Museum operates independently of His Majesty's Government, and decisions relating to the care and management of its collections are a matter for the Museum’s trustees.

The British Museum, as well as some other national museums, is prevented by law from removing objects from its collections, with a limited number of exceptions, none of which apply in this case. The Government has no plan to change the law.

As the former Director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, recounts in his A History of the World in 100 Objects (2010), it is thanks to the work of the British Museum over more than a century that so many fragments of the Mold Gold Cape have been reunited, following their dispersal shortly after it was discovered at Bryn-yr-Ellyllon in 1833.