Examination of Witnesses (Questions 300
- 312)
TUESDAY 9 JANUARY 2007
MR JULIAN
RADCLIFFE, MR
RICHARD ELLIS,
MR ANDREW
ELLIS, AND
DR FRED
HOHLER
Q300 Chairman: Can we switch our
attention quickly to the work of the Art Loss Register and Swift-Find.
You both appear to be doing roughly the same thing in terms of
maintaining a database of stolen art works. Do you work together
or are there differences between what you do?
Mr Richard Ellis: There are certainly
distinct differences in the operation. We have combined our resources
previously with the previous committee when it was looking at
and making the recommendation for a national database for stolen
cultural property, and the Art Loss Register and Trace, as it
was then, presented a joint paper. One of the reasons why the
recommendation failed to become a database was because the police
and the Home Office found that they could not work with the private
sector as it existed at that time. Swift-Find has been formed
only in 2004 so it is a very new company, but what it has done
is looked at the existing databases as they were then and decided
on how to create a system which is more than just a database of
stolen art, antiques and cultural property, it covers all stolen
property. By taking that route it has appealed to the Home Office
and to the police as a central registry of stolen goods. It happens
to work extremely well for art antiques and cultural property
and this has enabled the company to produce a business model which
provides a free service to the police, and a free service to cultural
institutions whereby records of what people own or institutions
own, can be placed on a positive database so there is a record
held securely of what exists prior to any theft. There is a stolen
database which currently holds around about four million records
of existing stolen data of all types of identifiable property
of which something in the region of 170,000 objects are of art
and antiques. We provide searching technologies which do not exist
anywhere else. The searching technologies include image matching,
so where you have a stolen painting, for instance, which may resurface
at a dealer, it is misattributed and you are not searching for
Turner on Turner you might be searching Turner on Constable, with
image matching you will still have nonetheless a match, and indeed
with reference to the high number of paintings with unknown artists
you will again be able to decipher a match on an object which
is stolen just purely on the image, and obviously there is also
textual searching and serial number searching. Also there is the
spider technology which is incorporated into the system. This
means that instead of a searcher having to spend many hours looking
at different websites on the internet, a single search for an
object results in a search of all publicly accessible internet
sites simultaneously, and if an object is not in the Swift-Find
database, for instance it is on a third party website, the searcher
will be taken to that website, they will be shown an image, a
description of the object and the contact information relevant
to that person for that particular object, so it becomes a one-stop
shop for searching for stolen property. In terms of the cost,
it is free to law enforcement and it is free to cultural institutions.
The way in which matches are notified is an anonymous system.
We hold no information as to who owns the property that has been
stolen. Instead we have the police reference number and matches
are electronically referred instantly to the investigating police
authority wherever they are in the world, and this has led to
the police now looking at Swift-Find and we have a number of direct
data transfer arrangements with different police forces in the
UK and outside, so at the point of recording a crime the police,
without any additional paperwork and time, can by clicking on
the property data button transfer the property data through to
Swift-Find with their unique police reference number and contact
point, and it is to that that information as to a match is then
immediately sent. Swift-Find does not get involved in the actual
recovery of stolen property other than as an alert system and
therefore we charge no recovery fees, so again it is not a case
of penalising the victims twice once for having property stolen
and again for having it recovered. This is a service which is
paid for by the searcher. It is an internet-accessible database,
the only one of its kind that is, which enables it to reach a
far wider group.
Q301 Chairman: Who pays you?
Mr Richard Ellis: It is paid for
by the searcher so where we have auction houses—and we have
something in the region of 60 of the top auction houses around
the world supplying their sale data prior to sale for which we
do various levels of searching—they pay for that service.
The internet searcher, the people using eBay for instance, and
there are many, many of those, pay for the service. The operation
is funded by the end user, the person who is conducting their
own due diligence on what they are seeking to buy.
Q302 Chairman: But unlike the Art
Loss Register you only catalogue stolen property?
Mr Richard Ellis: No, as I said
earlier, we have a positive database as well.
Q303 Chairman: You do have a positive
one?
Mr Richard Ellis: Very much so.
In fact, for the record I think it is important that Swift-Find
as it was formed in 2004 in December launched itself as a new
company called MyThings as an internet company. It was not everybody's
choice of name but there it is. MyThings presents itself as a
forum of collectors of all types of objects and provides them
with a positive database on which they can record, again anonymously,
their objects, their collections, whatever it is, be it iPods,
be it cameras, be it art and antiques. They have a secure inventory
held in that database. That can be searched against the incoming
lots for sale and also of course for dealers. The whole company
was set up by a pawnbroker because he had no database on which
to search for stolen property, so it has been set up really from
the end user perspective. Swift-Find acquired the old Trace database
of stolen art and antiques. This has been added to the data in
the new data base but the company has reverted to the label "Trace"
so the company is now MyThings and MyThings Trace, providing both
positive and negative.
Q304 Chairman: What does the Art
Loss Register do that has not been covered by everything that
Swift-find do?
Mr Radcliffe: The essential difference
is that we have been going for very much longer and have a bigger
and more sophisticated stolen database and we work much more closely
with the police. Our database was founded in 1990 but took over
a database which had been going since the 1960s and our emphasis
is only on art and antiques. We are not concerned with anything
which is not a cultural object. We have a large number of art
historians who work in many different languages. We undertake
a very great deal of sophisticated research on items for the police
when matches occur. We have a long and proven track record of
recovering items which I have listed in our evidence, and our
staff are being trained as special constables in order to provide
the additional staff for New Scotland Yard and other police forces.
We operate fully internationally so we have offices in overseas
countries and undertake the same sort of programme there. We have
two databases, one is the stolen items that we are searching for,
and the other is the ownership, so we take the Public Catalogue
Foundation, or any other ownership database, put it into the same
overall database as the stolen database and then check all the
fairs, dealers and auction house sales to find items that might
have been taken out of storage without somebody realising it and
are being offered for sale. We believe that this may become one
of the major deterrents to theft because if a museum is able to
say to its curatorial staff, its contractors and the public that
everything in this museum is recorded on the Art Loss Register
database and if it is offered for sale it will probably be matched
and that item will then be seized, that I think will be a major
deterrent because people know, as the Public Catalogue Foundation
has given evidence, that many items that are not well recorded
are not checked often because a full audit takes time and money.
Even somebody like the V&A can only check their three million
items every X years and when they do they will find there are
shortages, sometimes due to misfiling but sometimes items have
actually been stolen. We helped them recover some Constable drawings
for example. Our emphasis is much more on art-related objects
and much more on working with the police. We charge recovery fees
to the insurance industry and a very small fee to the cultural
institutions. Our whole emphasis is on cultural property and even
Dick would probably admit that we have the longest and most successful
track record.
Q305 Chairman: What about family
heirlooms?
Mr Radcliffe: Yes, we do that.
Historic houses, private collections and not just museums can
be recorded on our database. For houses which are open to the
public for example, this is very useful because they are very
susceptible to theft of smaller objects which they might not notice
immediately and which thieves do then try and unload very quickly.
Q306 Chairman: There are quite a
lot of people who do not live in historic houses but who might
actually have one item which has passed down the generations which
is worth a great deal of money.
Mr Radcliffe: We were founded
by the insurance industry and the art trade and the insurance
companies, with the agreement of the policy holder, give us records
of what is in a private house and should never be sold or if it
is going to be sold we are notified beforehand.
Mr Richard Ellis: I think it is
fair to say that for both the Art Loss Register and Trace MyThings,
the criteria for placing objects on the databases is not one of
value, it is one of identifiability.
Q307 Mr Evans: Can I just ask one
of you, have you done the Commons and the Lords?
Mr Radcliffe: I can give you a
very good example.
Dr Hohler: We can do.
Mr Radcliffe: We have had discussions
with a number of government departments. The MoD has not even
recorded their stolen items with us. There are a number of cases
where DCMS has given export licences for items that were stolen.
I will give you a classic example. Lord Roden had stolen a very
valuable, nationally important piece of furniture in Northern
Ireland. It was aggravated burglary and he died shortly thereafter.
This item was then put in the trade. The trade did not search
with us but we found it at Grosvenor House by which time it had
already been overseas in Miami and various other places for fairs
and an export licence had been given for it. There is a great
tendency by people not to register losses because they are embarrassed
or do not get round to it, and to not undertake due diligence
when they should do so. We are really breaking a great cultural
and attitude problem which is that for 100 years nobody had a
database, nobody searched and nobody recorded stolen items, and
that has got to change.
Q308 Mr Evans: Surely there should
be a responsibility on behalf of government because it is public
property?
Mr Radcliffe: What is more, we
do it at very low cost if they can give us a very good description.
They have to be able to give us a good description and perhaps
the first question should be how good are the descriptions held
by the Serjeant at Arms of the possessions in the Palace.
Q309 Chairman: The Public Catalogue
Foundation do it for nothing.
Mr Radcliffe: They might well
do it for you.
Q310 Mr Evans: Have you contacted
the Serjeant at Arms to see if they would be happy to?
Mr Andrew Ellis: We are going
to do the Government Art Collection later this year and we shall
be publishing before Christmas, and we could then move on to the
Palace of Westminster but we have had no contact yet.
Mr Richard Ellis: As a company
we have been in touch with the Government Art Collection as well
to offer a free inventory on the positive database, so these are
areas which are looked at. Picking up on something that Julian
said, the anecdotal wealth of these stories on where due diligence
should have been undertaken and was not are vast. Possibly the
most embarrassing one I had while I was at Scotland Yard was being
called to Sotheby's to a book auction where a dealer had spotted
some valuable books stolen from himself, and there was his own
property up for sale at Sotheby's, and when we traced it back
they had previously been recovered by the police and had been
sold at a police auction where the Sotheby's vendor had acquired
them. You can see how this is so easy. Property goes missing,
whether it is stolen, whether it is discarded or whatever by a
museum (which is easily done when they are sorting out stores)
and to actually have a positive, accurate register of what they
have is fundamental and so many of them do not have sufficient
accurate records.
Q311 Philip Davies: As your databases
get more sophisticated and improved does this lead to a reduction
in insurance premiums or even a reduction in the number of things
that need to be insured for theft because you can trace them much
more readily?
Mr Radcliffe: Yes, we have got
fairly good statistics of that now. Burglary in the United Kingdom
from domestic dwellings has reduced dramatically in the last few
years—that is not true of thefts from museums or other institutions—and
the insurance premiums therefore for private houses and art collections
have dropped quite significantly. The statistic is very interesting.
When we started with a very small database, only 20,000 items,
one in 4,000, of the items at Sotheby's and Christie's being offered
for sale was stolen, and usually consigned by the thief or a near
thief. Now we have a database of 180,000 items so you would think
you would be finding 15 times or 10 times as many. Not a bit,
we find only one in 11,000 is stolen and they are usually consigned
by good faith purchasers who have failed to search with us. So
there is no doubt that we are having a significant deterrent effect
at the top end of the trade but our problem is to get the middle
and lower end of the trade to search and they would prefer not
to know.
Q312 Chairman: We will have to draw
it to a close. Just before we finish can I ask you, we previously
did not have any database and we now appear to have two. Is there
anything in particular that you would like to see done by Government
or for this Committee to recommend in the area you are working
in?
Mr Radcliffe: We have had long
discussions with the Government about the Government giving to
us automatically all the stolen cultural objects which every police
force has reported to it. There has been some reservation about
that because of data protection. We are finding that has become
much less of an issue now. As our staff have become special constables
the confidence level has risen and most of the police forces now
are prepared to give us the data, and very often to ask the victim
to contact us, but the Data Protection Act has often been used
as an excuse for doing nothing.
Mr Richard Ellis: Just on the
point about data protection, one of the reasons why Swift-Find
MyThings chose to be an anonymous system and not record the data
of victims was because of the Data Protection Act, and by not
doing that we have found that the police are happy to share the
stolen data with us and hence the ability to have these direct
data transfer. We are shortly to start a pilot with Hertfordshire
Police where we are looking at providing an electronic mechanism
whereby victims, including museums, will be able to accurately
record the property that has been stolen from them which is then
sent electronically through to the police for verification and
onward circulation and obviously into the Trace database.
Mr Radcliffe: The police destroy
their records after seven years. We have got many, many cases
where we recover the item, we go along to the police, the police
cannot remember who it was stolen from, and that is why we insist
on trying to get the name of the victim.
Chairman: Can I thank you very much.
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