On Tuesday this week the Museums Association’s director Mark Taylor and president Vanessa Trevelyan, met with the Heritage Lottery Fund’s (HLF) chief executive Carole Souter and chair Jenny Abramsky.

Trevelyan said: “We discussed the situation facing the museum sector and what that means for museum services, particularly in the light of closures and collection sales.

“It is clear that museums should not be selling collections in order to fund their capital programmes, and the HLF is not looking to match fund in that way.

“We agreed that the matter should continue to be debated by the sector as the MA finds more councils proposing sales. The debate about how this is managed needs to be open and honest, and the MA needs to be involved.

“The HLF will be virtually alone in providing good quality strategic advice for museums, and our message to any museums with HLF grants that run into problems is that they should take full advantage of the advice that HLF can offer. Talk to the HLF as early as possible.”

The meeting also touched on the HLF’s relationship with Arts Council England as the latter takes over the functions of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, and how the HLF and the MA can work together to encourage and emphasise the importance of collections knowledge and skills, and the HLF’s role in philanthropy.

Applications to the HLF are still coming in, said Trevelyan, but while the HLF is not seeing an increase in applications those museums that are applying are looking for more money.

http://museumsassociation.org/news/14012011-hlf-will-not-fund-museums-selling-collections-for-capital-programmes

The Museums Association (MA) is aware of three current cases of financially motivated disposal, and suspects that there may be others.

Maurice Davies, the MA’s head of policy and communications, said: “In addition to Bolton and Gloucester, there is also a third museum that has contacted the MA regarding financially motivated disposal. It may be that there are also other cases around that we don’t know about.”

Gloucester City Council has invited Christie’s auction house to value its collections, and has begun a review of its objects.

A spokeswoman for the council said: “There are a lot of things in storage that are not relevant to Gloucester and have seen better days. The council is looking to sell, but does not know what yet.

“It is such a delicate process that we are taking advice, and are in dialogue with the MA and the accreditation board. “We are proud of our accreditation and the last thing that we want to do is to lose that.”

The council is looking to raise £100,000 towards a new cafe and renovated education facilities at Gloucester City Museum, alongside disabled access at the Folk Museum. Davies stressed that the MA was keen to talk in confidence with any museum considering financially motivated disposal.

“They can come to us before they have particular items for advice on the process. To meet the requirements of the code of ethics, the process is the most important thing, so we are keen to advise at an early stage,” he said.

Hampshire County Council  is looking to use volunteers to keep four of its sites open. The council is in negotiations with local district and borough councils over an alternative management model for the Curtis Museum and Allen Gallery in Alton, the Bursledon Windmill, and the Rockbourne Roman Villa.

This could lead to the development of volunteer teams to support interpretation and maintenance at Bursledon Windmill and activities at Rockbourne Roman Villa and the Allen Gallery.

The changes will take  place in April, as part of a restructure to address the likely loss of more than £1m of Renaissance funding, coupled with the government-imposed funding cuts.

Across the museum service, the equivalent of 26 full-time posts will be deleted, of which nine collections-management positions will be made redundant.

A source close to the museum service said: “The service is dumbing down and will lose lots of experienced, professional staff. It is worrying that there is a perceived inability to cope with the demands of the museum service in the future.”

Tony Hammond, a negotiator for the union Prospect, who has been involved in negotiations with National Museums Liverpool over its plans to extend its work-experience volunteering scheme, said: “There are lots of national and local authority museums that operate with volunteers.

“We are not against the use of volunteers, but we are opposed to full-time roles being replaced by volunteers.

“The concern is that real jobs are replaced by people being forced off benefits, and maybe people who don’t have relevant expertise are forced into those positions. That is where the Big Society may lead. My concern is that this skill base will not recover.”

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.

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has announced cuts of 15% for all national museums.

Renaissance in the Regions

It will also cut the Renaissance in the Regions programme by 15% over the same period, to £45.567m in 2011, £44.725m in 2012, £44.050m in 2013 and £43.914m in 2014.

Arts Council England

Arts Council England (ACE) will receive an overall cut of 29.6%, from £387.728m in 2011 to £349.392m 2014, a total, in real terms, of nearly £350m. The DCMS has asked that ACE does not cut funding to its regularly funded organisations by more than 15%. Arts minister Ed Vaizey said the DCMS would also ask that ACE reduce its administration costs by 50%.

It is widely expected that ACE will inherit many of the functions of the Museums Libraries and Archives Council (MLA), including Renaissance, when the MLA is wound up in April 2012. Vaizey said a decision on this had not yet been made, but the body that inherits the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council’s functions would receive a separate administration budget.

Local authorities

The chancellor George Osborne announced that local authority budgets would be reduced by 7.1% each year for the next four years. Museums are discretionary services for local authorities.

National museums

The government will maintain free entry to national museums, and capital projects at the British Museum, Tate Modern and British Library will go ahead.

The government will also allow national museums to access their reserves to a total of £143m over four years.

English Heritage

Funding to English Heritage is to be cut by 32% over four years, from £114.742m in 2011 to £96.962m in 2014.

DCMS

The DCMS has seen its core budget cut from £1.4bn to £1.1bn over the next four years.

The DCMS will move out of its headquarters in Cockspur Street by the end of the financial year. It is widely thought that the department will move to Buckingham Palace Road, where it will share with the Department for International Development.

National Museums Liverpool (NML) has had to pay out £500,000 to architects AEW following a dispute over work on the Museum of Liverpool.

The Manchester-based company was appointed in 2007 after NML sacked the designers at Netherlands-based company 3XN.

Museums Journal understands that AEW demanded payment for work that it argued was not in the contract, taking the case to formal adjudication after NML refused to pay.

At the adjudication last month, Tony Bingham, a lawyer and construction industry expert, upheld AEW’s claim and ruled that NML should also pay costs of £32,000.

An NML spokesman said: “This is a £72m scheme that involves scores of contractors and consultants. With all major projects such as this, there are differences of opinion that need to be worked through.

“We want the very best for this museum and it is right for us to control costs tightly. It is not unreasonable to expect our contractors and consultants to do the same.

“We are disappointed with the adjudicator’s decision and are taking the matter further with our lawyers.”

Culture secretary wants creationism in museum.

An early day motion in parliament has expressed regret “that there is pressure to include creationism” in the Ulster Museum and says that the teaching or promotion of religious beliefs should be separate from that of science.

Northern Ireland culture secretary Nelson McCausland had written to the museum’s board of trustees asking them to “consider how alternative views of the origin of the universe and the origin of life can be recognised and accommodated in national museums”.

Writing on his blog last month, the minister defended the letter, saying: “We need a society where it is possible to have a reasonable discussion about issues such as museums or culture, indeed that is an essential element in a shared and better future.”

The early day motion had seven signatures as Museums Journal went to press.

The druid who requested the reburial of human remains from the Alexander Keiller Museum in Avebury will formally challenge English Heritage’s decision to keep the remains in the museum.

Paul Davies, who lodged the request as the reburial officer for the Council of British Druid Orders, will lay out concerns over due process and the phrasing of English Heritage’s consultation questions, as well as highlighting the disparity between the druid organisation and English Heritage’s resources.

Since Davies made his request in June 2006, Sebastian Payne, English Heritage’s chief scientist, estimated that the process had cost his organisation about £40,000.

Piotr Bienkowski, an independent cultural consultant and former acting director of Manchester Museum, said: “Everyone knew what the decision was going to be. In some ways, I wonder why they bothered with an expensive consultation process.”

But Maurice Davies, the Museums Association’s head of policy and communication, said: “I’m not surprised at the decision, but the scale of the consultation is indicative of how much more thoughtful museums are being about human remains in their collections and considering a range of views about them.”

Payne defended the time and expense.

“The request has wider implications for holders of prehistoric human remains and for other museums in a broader context,” he said.

This year sees the 10th anniversary of the publication of Stealing History: the Illicit Trade in Cultural Material.

Commissioned by the Museums Association (MA) and the International Council of Museums (Icom) UK and co-authored by Neil Brodie, Jenny Doole and Peter Watson at the now-defunct Illicit Antiquities Research Centre at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, the report looked at the role of government in preventing illicit trade, and the measures museums should take to protect themselves from participating, albeit unwittingly, in the trade.

Its publication in 2000 coincided with the release of Icom’s first Red List, documenting endangered cultural material in Africa, and preceded an investigation and report later that year by the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee’s Advisory Panel on Illicit Trade (APIT).

The confluence of Stealing History and the advisory panel’s report came about through a growing awareness of the issue, and the need to address it, particularly in the UK. Interpol’s London Bureau told the APIT that during 1999 it had dealt with 132 cases connected with the trafficking of stolen cultural goods and HM Revenue & Customs valued the total of cultural goods seized between June 1995 and June 1999 at £20.3m. The implications for museums acquiring unprovenanced antiquities were clear.

One of the most important results of Stealing History’s publication, says Maurice Davies, the MA’s head of policy and communications and a member of the advisory panel, was an increased awareness of the issues for museums.

“There was a feeling prior to the report that if an item might have been looted, that it was better it was in a museum. After the report there was shock that so much stuff was looted, and a change in attitude as a result.”

The decade since has seen a sea change in approach by government and museums. In 2002 the UK ratified the 1970 Unesco convention on illicit trade, which says “the import, export or transfer of ownership of cultural property effected contrary to the provisions adopted under this Convention by the States Parties thereto, shall be illicit”.

This was followed by the Dealing in Cultural Objects (Offences) Act 2003, making it an offence for anyone to deal dishonestly in tainted cultural property, and the Iraq (United Nations Sanctions) Order 2003, prohibiting the illegal exportation or importation of cultural property from Iraq after 6 August 1990.

Crucially for museums, in 2005 the Department for Culture, Media and Sport issued guidelines on combating illicit trade, laying out the process for due diligence and declaring that “in all cases, if there is any suspicion whatsoever about the item, then you should not proceed with the acquisition”, while in 2006 the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council established its Cultural Property advice internet portal.

All of these changes find their genesis in the recommendations of Stealing History and the APIT report, but 10 years on, some of those recommendations have still not been followed. Chief among these is the government’s failure to ratify the 1954 Hague Convention on the protection of cultural property in the event of an armed conflict.

John Curtis, the keeper of the Middle East collections at the British Museum, believes that had it been ratified prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the situation on the ground might have been different. What Curtis describes as “the failure by coalition troops to protect the Iraqi cultural heritage” saw illegal excavations at sites across the country and the looting of the national museum and several provincial museums.

However, he qualifies this by saying: “The situation in the four southern provinces under British control is not so bad as the situation further north in places like Babylon, Baghdad and Mosul.”

In the UK, tightened legislation has meant that Iraqi antiquities are not circulating as openly as they once were, says the head of Scotland Yard’s Art and Antiques Unit, Vernon Rapley, but suspicious material from Iran, Afghanistan and Syria is still being imported.

“It is a clandestine activity, so there are no clear figures,” Interpol’s Karl-Heinz Kind says. “But if you suppose that the trade in general, including the legal trade, is increasing, that would presuppose that perhaps illicit trade is on the increase, too.”

While the trade in antiquities, illicit or otherwise, may have increased, acquisitions of antiquities by museums in the UK, and increasingly the US, have gone the opposite way. For James Cuno, the director of the Art Institute of Chicago, this is a sign that the constraints on acquisitions are now too tight.

“We have given great consideration to the role museums might be playing in the loss of archaeological evidence through looting by our acquisition of antiquities with less than complete provenance. Over time we have accepted more restrictive conditions for the acquisition of such material.”

He argues that the effect on museums in north America is that they rarely acquire antiquities because of “the constraints we are having to put on ourselves and because of the constraints that various legal machines have put upon museums seeking to acquire antiquities”.

But Colin Renfrew, a senior fellow of the McDonald Institute and a member of the APIT, disagrees: “It is a bad sign that some people wonder if we shouldn’t take a softer line. It would simply open the doors for floods of looted antiquities into museums. It would legitimise what goes on.”

Renfrew is backed by Neil Brodie, one of the co-authors of Stealing History. He says: “People are digging stuff up because there is a market and historically museums have underpinned that market.”

He can point to museums in the US and the UK today, although he won’t say which ones, that are still acquiring objects the provenance of which is “pretty suspicious”. But in general, he says, there has been a positive change in attitude.

And this is, perhaps, Stealing History’s greatest triumph: over the past decade, the views of its authors have become the consensus for museums. Even its contributors are surprised by the impact that it has had.

“I thought it would just be a report for internal consumption, and not a lot would come of it,” Brodie says. “I know now it does get quoted a lot in academic literature, because we set out to make our arguments based in hard facts, and that’s why it gets referred to a lot.”

The report may well have changed attitudes and raised the level of debate and awareness about the issue, but the reality is that looting of cultural property still takes place across the globe.

Museums can play a role in preventing it by checking provenance and closing down the market for such goods. But as long as former US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld can get away with saying “stuff happens” after the looting of the National Museum of Iraq, then there is some way to go in preventing illicit trade altogether.

The International Council of Museums’ (Icom) Red Lists contain categories of cultural objects around the world which are particularly vulnerable to illicit traffic. There are currently six Red Lists, covering Africa, Latin America, Peru, Iraq, Afghanistan and Cambodia. Icom is planning to launch a list for Central America and Mexico next month, and is also currently working on lists for Colombia and China.

The Red Lists are representative rather than exhaustive, designed to flag up areas and types of object to potential buyers so that they will know to take precautionary measures if dealing with an artefact that they think may originate from a Red List country.

The following items are a selection of some of the most endangered types of object around the world:

Iraq

From the Emergency Red List of Iraqi Antiquities at Risk, 2003
Any object with Cuneiform writing on it. This writing is composed of horizontal, vertical or oblique strokes with triangular ends, impressed or incised into the material.

Afghanistan

From the Red List of Afghanistan Antiquities at Risk, 2006
Pottery and ceramics from the Islamic period.

Latin America

From the Red List of Latin American Cultural Objects at Risk, 2003
Wooden snuff trays from the pre-Colombian period.

Peru

From the Red List of Peruvian Antiquities at Risk, 2007
Fired-clay vessels of various shapes with incised, modeled, molded and painted designs.

Cambodia

From the Red List of Cambodian Antiquities at Risk, 2009
Stone from pre-Angkor period (from 6th to 8th centuries AD).

Africa

From the Red List of African Archaeological Objects, 2000
Stone statues from Esie, Nigeria.

The National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF) today granted £1.285m to Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent, allowing the museums to jointly purchase the Staffordshire Hoard, worth a total of £3.285m.

But according to Ian Van Arkadie, head of community services at Stoke-on-Trent City Council, the hoard, which contains some 1,500 objects, may not go on display for as long as two years, pending research and conservation work overseen by the British Museum in conjunction with the two Midlands museums.

“We need to bear in mind that research and conservation may have to take priority in the short term,” he said. “But we would hope to put a small collection on display to maintain interest.”

Van Arkadie said the hoard would be split between the two museums, then rotated regularly. He added that they were also looking at the possibility of making short term loans to other local museums and that in the future consideration would be given to loans to other UK museums and overseas museums.

The Potteries museum is now looking to raise £500,000 to refurbish its archaeology gallery, where it will display the hoard.

Alongside the NHMF funding, a public appeal raised £900,000, a further £600,000 was donated by trusts and foundations, The Art Fund donated £300,000, and Birmingham City Council and Stoke City Council both contributed £100,000.

The hoard dates from around the 7th century and, in total, is made up 5kg of gold and 1.3kg of silver.

Historian David Starkey said: “The Staffordshire Hoard provides us with vital clues to our ancient past and now we can set about decoding them. I’m delighted that all the other funding bodies and the generous public have helped save these breathtaking treasures for posterity.”

Culture minister Margaret Hodge said: “This is fantastic news. The great thing about the NHMF, and the reason we fought so hard to maintain its funding for next year in a tight economic climate, is that it can move quickly to help save items at very short notice.

”The Staffordshire Hoard is a great example of this. Thanks to this grant, these superb items will be able to stay, and be enjoyed, where they belong: in the Midlands where they were discovered.”

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport awarded the NHMF an extra £5m as a one-off payment this year, which it will be allowed to carry into the next financial year.