Ivory Bill — House of Lords, 2018-09-10
Topic: Domestic Commerce
Charles Hay (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, I declare my interests as set out in the register of the House, in particular as a director or trustee of several museums and in respect of the insurance world This is a technical amendment to do with some insurance issues, so I hope to gallop through it, as I am sure not many of your Lordships would be that interested. I should like to add my own thoughts to the messages to the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, because I was going to start by citing something that he said in his Second Reading speech. He quoted a figure, which I have also seen, of there being somewhere between 2 million and 3 million objects that have an ivory content in the UK in personal collections and museum collections. He said that he felt that was an underestimate, and I agree with him that it probably is an underestimate. The UK is a heavy buyer of insurance. I can say with confidence that the majority of those objects are the subject of insurance, so I am talking about a large number of objects all round As I looked at the Bill, there were three areas where I felt there could be problems for the way in which the insurance world works today. The first was in simply paying a claim. I am sure that many of your Lordships have not made a claim and so may not realise this, but the point is that, when paying a claim, the insurer will pay out a sum of money, but the title of the object insured will transfer to the insurer. There would probably also be another agreement, a release agreement, between the insured and the insurer. Therefore, there is a tremendous amount of consideration moving and, certainly, the title of the object moving. That knowledge was with me as I read Clause 1(3), as I was very worried that the paying of the claim may be problematic under the way the Bill is currently drafted. For museums and private individuals, I thought that was regrettable Secondly, another thing that goes across to the successful claimant is a right of repurchase. Certainly all of the specialist insurance markets grant this right and I think all markets now in the UK grant it. This is a right whereby, if an object is stolen and comes back—quite a lot of stuff does come back, particularly the more valuable stuff, because if there are photographs of it, it is difficult for people to dispose of it—people have the opportunity to repurchase the object at the lower of the market value or the amount of money that was paid out in the insurance claim. For private individuals, that is often very attractive because many people are underinsured, so maybe they can buy something back that is worth more at a lower price. Certainly, for many private individuals, it is attractive because the sorts of things that are stolen are often things with great sentimental value to them. This is a very valuable right for private insurance. For the museum-insured area, which I am deeply involved with, it is important because often what is stolen is the key part of one or other of their collections, and it is very difficult to source replacement parts. I feel that this repurchase right is very difficult under Clause 1(3) A third problem, which is much more technical, is to do with the way that insurance companies and Lloyd’s syndicates set themselves up, and that is that they move around the salvage rights within themselves. Naturally, this happens in a series of transactions that take place—most famously in the Lloyd’s syndicates, where there is a fresh syndicate every year—and so they move around these rights of repurchase further down. A Lloyd’s syndicate will need to be able to trade with a successor syndicate in order to preserve this right of repurchase. Of course, there are many latent rights of repurchase out there at the moment, which will all be covered, I assume, by this Bill. So this is not about fresh thefts but about stuff that comes back Those three issues were circulating in my mind, and I feel that there is a difficulty. I do not think it is the intention of the Bill to stop people from being able to rebuy their own stuff following an insurance loss. That can have nothing to do with the admirable intentions of this Bill, so I drafted a probing amendment, merely to just raise the debate, but not to settle on the precise language of how we deal with this problem that I have identified. I have limited it to providing some sort of route for just the 200 or so professional insurers in the UK. These are carriers who are all regulated by the FCA and who, I can assure your Lordships, if they saw any naughtiness, would be out with the fines book straightaway. I beg to move.