Both physical and online threats are a real threat to Wales’ museums
St Fagans is part of the Amguedda Cymru site(Image: Western Mail)
Wales’ museums are a “high profile” target to thieves, the boss of Amgueddfa Cymru has said. Jane Richardson, the chief executive, was speaking after thieves allegedly stole Bronze Age jewellery from St Fagans museum. She said there are physical threats, but also online threats. One online threat six weeks ago was “almost very serious”.
Ms Richardson was appearing for a scheduled appearance in front of the Senedd’s culture committee. She was asked to give an update about the police investigation, which is ongoing.
The break-in took place in the early hours of Monday and gold pieces from the museum’s Bronze Age collection of priceless Welsh artefacts were stolen. Ms Richardson described it as a “targeted” attack.
Two men have been arrested after the raid, which took just four minutes. For our free daily briefing on the biggest issues facing the nation, sign up to the Wales Matters newsletter here
“You know there was a break in, in the early hours of Monday morning. Significant items were taken from the collection in what we understand, it was a very targeted attack,” she told Senedd Members.
“Police were able to gather a lot of evidence at the scene. They acted incredibly, speedily and I would like to put on record our heartfelt thanks, and admiration for the work of the police, who have been superb.
“As a result of the evidence, they were able to collect, two arrests were made yesterday.
“They worked in close collaboration with the police force in Northamptonshire, which is where the two individuals were apprehended. And investigations are very much ongoing.
“So we’re still very much in the live stage of the investigation,” Ms Richardson said.
Asked about the safety of the national collections, chair Kate Eden said: “I think it’s important to distinguish between the concerns that we’ve been raising in the committee’s been raising about the funding for the maintenance, for the physical fabric of the building and what happened on Sunday night, which was not as a result of any of the issues that we’ve been raising for a number of years now. So I think the two two issues are quite separate and distinct.”
Ms Richardson said there has been an increased risk to organisations like Amgueddfa Cymru for her two years she has been in post.
“We actually increased security and security measures over the past two years,” she said. “We work very, very closely with the police. They had been on site with us at St Fagans, helping us with inspections of security in the week leading up to this attack.
“They are regularly with us because we know we are a high profile target, so I wouldn’t say as such that we will be taking immediate actions as a result of this particular incident.
“We will, of course, review what we can learn from it when we’ve just got a little bit more time to look back and understand it and anything that we can learn, we will implement. But we were already at what you could call a high alert kind of level.
“Cuts that we made were very high profile, but we didn’t make any cuts at all to any of our security arrangements. It was quite the opposite. We have been ramping those up because of the environment we operate in,” she said.
She said that included digital attacks. Ms Richardson said they get £5m in capital funding each year from the Welsh Government and a third of that goes towards digital security and digital systems.
“We had an attack about six weeks or more ago that that was almost, very serious. But our team have been exceptional so far and with holding those, we keep upgrading our technology. But we are told as a sector and by our own experts, an organisation like ours, it will be a question of when, not if, some day someone will get through it. It’s just one of those facts that we have to live with.”
There have been previous concerns about the state of the building at the national museum in Cardiff.
The committee was told there has been a “substantial increase” in capital funding made available to the museum to address some of the most urgent concerns. “A number of priority works are being undertaken at the moment and through the winter,” she said.
She was asked about budgets. Next year, Wales’ finance minister Mark Drakeford has said it will be a “neutral” budget due to it being an election year.
Ms Richardson said: “If we were just in line with inflation, that would leave us just under £3 million short of what we need for our steady state, strong revenue performance so we would need to find a way of reducing programming and activities to address that shortfall.”
She said it would “problematic” for them if they only got an inflationary rise on capital in terms of digital security and the building repairs needed.
She said there had been cutbacks within the organisation, for example, not paying “tens of thousands” of pounds for stands at external events such as the National Eisteddfod.
However, she said after serious concerns about staff morale in previous years, things were now better and there had been “significant progress”. “I think the organisation feels like it’s in quite a different place,” Ms Richardson said.