Published in Museums Journal, December 2010
Former Art Fund Prize winner the Wedgwood Museum is waiting for the result of a judicial ruling next month to find out whether it will be forced to sell its collections.
The museum faces a £135m pension deficit inherited from the Wedgwood Pension Plan Trustee Limited, which went into administration last year.
The ruling will decide whether the collections are held as a permanent endowment and therefore protected, or part of the charitable company’s corporate property, and available to creditors.
Museums Journal understands that the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) has been in discussions with the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) over what should happen should the ruling go against the museum.
Tristram Hunt, MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central, said: “It is not acceptable if the collections are dispersed or taken to London. I don’t think the British Museum or V&A would be interested. It is a question of how we manage the collection in a museum in Stoke-on-Trent.”
The judicial ruling will provide a definitive position on the status of the collections following advice from the Charity Commission that the collection is not protected.
During a parliamentary debate about the museum’s predicament in October, Ed Vaizey, the culture minister, said: “We are almost, as it were, walk-on parts in an obscure Dickensian novel, in which a complicated piece of legislation has the most dramatic and unintended consequences. Potentially, those consequences put one of the great cultural jewels of the nation under threat.”
The museum received £200,000 in January from the MLA to meet its legal costs, and was given approval to use £25,000 of its Art Fund Prize winnings to support its running costs.
The museum has also received £100,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund.
