9. Supplementary memorandum submitted
by Salvo
Evidence given to the Committee by HM Customs
and Excise, the Home Office and DCMS on 11 November 2003
HM CUSTOMS
The thrust of questions concerned imports or
through traffic of cultural goods from abroad, but nothing on
the movement of the UK's own cultural goods to countries abroad.
The Dealing in Cultural Objects Act (DICO) is about the import
and export of foreign cultural goods into and out of the UK, and
the export of the UK's cultural goods abroad. When the EU Works
of Art Export Licence Directive was introduced in 1999, one employee
of Customs (on the early morning shift at weekends at Heathrow)
started impounding stained glass removed from churches due to
be exported outside the EU because no EU licence had been applied
for. Customs claimed that any object from any building, with no
lower value, needed a licence. So a brick would need a licence.
DCMS baulked at this and accompanied Thornton Kay of Salvo and
a dealer to Brussels to seek clarification of the law. SALVO suggested
that the EU law should only apply to scheduled monuments and not
to listed buildings or ones in conservation areas. The point at
issue became: if an item has been legitimately removed from a
demolished building, even if that building had once been listed,
once permission had been given for the demolition, that item was
no longer a "cultural good" and so did not need a licence.
The new Act "DICO" goes against this, and brings in
a huge amount of additional material from demolished buildings.
Therefore, unless "cultural goods" are better defined,
DCMS will be forced into issuing, and HM Customs into policing,
thousands, or tens of thousands of EU Works of Art Export Licences
each year—the very thing that DCMS sought to avoid. The
cost will be enormous.
HOME OFFICE
The Metropolitan Police say they found 9,000
objects of cultural value and high monetary value linked to 3,000
of 75,000 annual burglaries. They have they never told Salvo of
a single instance of such a theft. Is this because no object was
been removed from a listed building or garden (in which case none
of the 9,000 objects would fall within the definition of cultural
good or the ambit of DICO) or were they all from overseas? Sadly,
no-one on the committee asked, and no-one asked how many theft
alerts had subsequently been raised, and what success at recovery
had there been. Since various agencies currently exist why had
the police not used them? Why has the Metropolitan Police Service
suddenly, and for the first time ever, put up a small database
of stolen items on the internet in the past few months when it
never bothered before? Could it be they feel that they may lose
some control to outside agencies? The idea that a database does
not already exist for "fireplaces, baths and house fittings"
is not true. Salvo's has existed for eleven years. Why have the
Met not used it when a quarter of the UK's police forces have
and still do, and an average of 14% of items raised as Salvo Theft
Alerts have been recovered (but not in the Met area of course)?
Regarding the estimated £12 million cost,
we would very much like to tender for the database. We currently
run a national database with 80,000 users a month, at an annual
cost of less than £30,000. The average cost to for us to
register an object including discussions, phone calls and photos
is about £50. Some objects are placed on the database by
the police themselves (none by the Met). We have already developed
the technology and would not be seeking to recover our development
costs from the Home Office. The Met and the Council for the Prevention
of Art Theft (CoPAT) have no technology to speak of. It would
be an expensive fiasco if the Home Office were to use either of
these two agencies. Why don't they simply use Trace, the Art Loss
Register and Salvo who would do this enormously cheaper and better.
Why are they considering a proposal by CoPAT (with no track record)
to tender when the three agencies who have a track record going
back 10 years have not been invited? It is quite obvious from
what the Minister, Caroline Flint MP, said that both CoPAT and
the Met are scrabbling to make up for lost time in terms of technology
for fear of losing out to the three other agencies. If the Home
Office use the Met or CoPAT the taxpyer will foot the bill for
another hugely expensive computer experiment. Salvo's is currently
the only open database usable by the police and visible on the
internet by anyone.
2 December 2003
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