Museums eye protection to halt fire sales of treasures
MUSEUMS could be given new safeguards to prevent “fire sales” of priceless artefacts if they go bust as a result of Covid-19.
Ministers are considering changing the law to prevent collections being broken up and sold off as part of a typical insolvency process.
The sector has warned there is a “real possibility” of some independent museums becoming insolvent following months of lost revenue. The Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth, which houses a 19,000-item Tudor collection, warned that it was in “mortal peril”, while the Florence Nightingale Museum in central London said it faced an “absolutely huge challenge” to survive.
Oliver Dowden, the Culture Secretary, said he was drawing up a bailout package for the arts, adding: “I am not going to stand by and see our worldleading position in arts and culture destroyed.”
But museum chiefs believe such a scheme could come too late for some institutions and have been privately lobbying for new protections to ensure that collections are not sold off.
Alistair Brown, policy manager at the Museums Association, said: “The possibility of independent museums becoming insolvent due to the coronavirus crisis is real, and it raises the prospect of museum collections and buildings being broken up and sold off as assets of insolvent organisations.
“Such an outcome would reverse decades of hard-won development and investment, and the potentially irretrievable loss of public access to much of our heritage.”
In a letter to Baroness Barker, a Liberal Democrat peer who has lobbied ministers on behalf of the sector, Earl Howe, a government frontbencher in the House of Lords, said: “The Government understands the risk that insolvency poses to museums and their collections. Led by DCMS [the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport], we are currently looking at options, including legislative, for how we may be able to prevent the dispersal, and therefore potential loss, of these collections.”
Lord Howe’s letter followed a debate in which Baroness Barker warned that without new protections, many artefacts could be sold off in fire sales – the name given to the sale of assets at heavily discounted prices when a company is liquidated.
She said: “We have a number of independent museums – not the large museums set up under an Act of Parliament, nor those associated with local government – and they are typically charitable companies. They have a very big fear. If they are in danger, and a number of them currently think that they may well be, their collections immediately become part of the assets of any insolvency procedure.”