Examination of Witnesses (Questions 475
- 479)
TUESDAY 23 MAY 2000
DETECTIVE CHIEF
SUPERINTENDENT JOHN
COLES AND
DETECTIVE CONSTABLE
PENNY STEVENSON
Chairman
475. DCS Coles and DC Stevenson, thank you very
much indeed for coming to see us today. We had a very useful meeting
with you on your own home ground recently and I am sure I speak
for the Committee when I say how very impressed we were with your
work and your operation.
(Detective Chief Superintendent Coles) Thank you,
Sir.
476. Having said that, and said that with very
great sincerity and admiration, could I go on to say do you not
wish you had the manpower and resources of the General?
(Detective Chief Superintendent Coles) That is an
unusual, perhaps in a way, question to ask a police officer or
not so unusual because a policeman will always say he never has
enough resources. If you were to ask me the same question about
other parts of the policing I would probably say I had not got
enough resources.
477. What are you able to do with the resources
that you have and the men and women power that you have? What
can you not do that you would like to do if you had the resources?
(Detective Chief Superintendent Coles) I think we
provide a fairly efficient and effective service to, in the main,
London but obviously, because of the way the art trade operates,
beyond London as well, both nationally and internationally. Our
focus remains around items which are defined as stolen within
the British criminal law and I suppose that is the basis where
perhaps there is some conflict in our role in trying to assist
other countries. Basically the fundamental difference is the interpretation
of the law and the confines that we find ourselves in. But, the
officers who work for me within the Scotland Yard Arts and Antiques
Squad, which is extremely small, are extremely conscientious.
They are extremely dedicated and also they have a personal interest
in the type of work that they undertake which inevitably leads
to perhaps greater enthusiasm than in other fields of police work.
Where you have a personal interest you are more dedicated.
Chairman: Certainly we were very impressed
with the dedication that we saw. Mr Wyatt?
Derek Wyatt
478. Good morning. You heard the previous witness
talk about what his perception is. Do you agree broadly with his
assessment or do you disagree with his assessment that there is
a large illicit trade and it is drug driven?
(Detective Chief Superintendent Coles) There is an
illicit trade without doubt, whether it is always necessarily
drug alone driven, I would not necessarily agree with. It breaks
down into a number of issues. From my perspective there is the
illegal export aspect which in some ways is quite separate from
the opportunity of criminals to use the art world to launder the
proceeds of drug crime and other crime such as fraud.
479. Would you be able to put a figure on this?
Is this a one billion market? I do not know, is this a £300
million market? What sort of figure do you think is out there
with regard to this? I suppose I am asking for the UK bit but
I guess it is impossible to say it is UK only?
(Detective Chief Superintendent Coles) I anticipated
a question along these lines before I came here. I conducted some
research, going back over 10 years, to try and find out where
particular figures that have been bandied around about this subject
emanated from. One of the figures is $3 billion. I have found
reports going back 10 years where there is an estimate as high
as $6 billion. At the other extreme of the scale the suggestion
is that it could be as low as $300 million. In order to try and
put some definitive figure upon this scale, my colleague, Miss
Stevenson, has conducted some research in the last few days, and
it might be better if she explained her research to you.
(Detective Constable Stevenson) I think what we have
to actually state from the start is that the cases are really
anecdotal. There are no statistics kept. We have to bear in mind
that the whole trade, whether illicit or legal, actually encompasses
jewellery, works of art and antiquities, and as there is no actual
Home Office information that is kept we have had to turn to the
insurance companies and the insurance industry to get the figures
we have. A loss adjuster I spoke to estimated that this trade
is costing the public between £300-£500 million per
year in the United Kingdom alone. I can break that down to where
he got those figures from. The Association of British Insurers
on average record losses by theft in both domestic and commercial
as being somewhere in the region of about £600 million per
year. Out of that figure they assume that roughly half relates
to domestic theft. So leaving aside your office break-ins or something
like that and computer thefts, they would say that approximately
£300 million goes on domestic burglaries, and out of the
domestic thefts, roughly, in the settlement, two thirds of the
items in that category are jewellery, silver, collectibles and
fine art. That accounts for the first £200 million of insured
losses. Secondly, they state that Lloyds is excluded from the
total and, of course, the majority of very high value fine art
and antiques are insured through Lloyds. We do know that worldwide
Lloyds pay out in the region of about £100 million into the
fine art and jewellery category. So it is possible to estimate
that between 40 and 50 per cent of that is attributable to the
United Kingdom. That takes the figure to roughly £250 million.
Then they looked at the area of uninsured loss, which is extremely
difficult to estimate. This would include properties such as National
Trust properties, English Heritage and churches, but they reckon
that is somewhere in the region of £75 million per annum.
Then there are those losses which go entirely unreported, which,
of course, you can only guess at, but they arrive somewhere in
the region of £300, £400 or £500 million per year.
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