Police checked museum security week before gold jewellery stolen

Unspecified gold artefacts from the museum's valuable Bronze Age collection were stolen in the early hours of Monday morning

Police were at St Fagans National Museum of History in Cardiff "helping with inspections of security" the week before Bronze Age gold jewellery was stolen, the museum's chief executive has said.

Jane Richardson assured the Senedd's culture committee that the museum had not made cuts to security measures over recent years but had been "ramping those up because of the environment we operate in".

She added that the police "are regularly with us because they know we are a high profile target". South Wales Police have been asked to comment.

Two men from Northampton have been charged with burglary and remanded in custody.

St Fagans National Museum of Wales is on the western edge of Cardiff

Gavin Burnett, 43, and Darren Burnett, 50, appeared at Northampton Magistrates' Court on Wednesday.

During the committee it also emerged that Amgueddfa Cymru (Museum Wales) the body responsible for St Fagans and another six national museums across Wales, currently has only provisional accreditation as a museum due to an "administrative error".

Police were called to St Fagans, four miles west of Cardiff city centre, at about 00:30 BST on Monday and several items, including Bronze Age jewellery, were stolen from a display case in the main building.

Officers are still searching for the items.

Jane Richardson told the committee on Wednesday that "the increased risk to an organisation like ours has been the case certainly for 18 months, if not the two years I've been in post, so we actually increased security measures over the past two years".

"We work very, very closely with the police. They had been on site with us in St Fagans helping us with inspections of security in the week leading up to this attack.

"They are regularly with us because they know we are a high profile target."

She said the museum will not be "taking immediate actions as a result of this particular incident, but we will of course look at what we can learn from it".

"Anything we can learn we will implement.

"But we were already at what you can call a high alert kind of level."

Referring to "very high profile" cuts to the museum's funding, she said "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 the environment we operate in".

The museum's chairwoman Kate Eden emphasised the need to "distinguish between the concerns we've been raising, and the committee has been raising, about the funding for the physical fabric of the building and what happened on Sunday night which was not a result of any of the issues that we've been raising for a number of years".

"The two issues are quite separate and distinct."

Only provisional accreditation

Later in the session, it was revealed that Amgueddfa Cymru currently has only provisional accreditation as a museum due to an "administrative error several years ago".

Plaid Cymru's Heledd Fychan asked for an explanation after discovering the curious situation in minutes from a July meeting of Amgueddfa Cymru's board of trustees.

To be accredited institutions must meet certain standards, so the public, as well as funding and governing bodies, have confidence in them.

Ms Eden told the committee "it transpired that the board of trustees had not officially signed off the current five-year business plan".

"We knew that they had, but couldn't find the actual minute to refer to and, therefore, we had to do a retrospective approval of the business plan, earlier this summer," she said.

She said that Arts Council England, which runs the accreditation scheme, needed a formal minute of the board approving the business plan from four years ago.

An application for full accreditation had been made and "we are assured" that certification "will be coming through any day", she added.

In recent years Amgueddfa Cymru has been subject to Welsh government funding cuts and a bullying row which left taxpayers with a bill of more than £620,000.

Founded in 1948, St Fagans is one of Wales' most popular heritage attractions and is one of seven national museums under the curation of Amgueddfa Cymru, which is Welsh for Museum Wales.

The authorities have so far not specified which items were taken, or their value. The museum's Bronze Age collection includes gold ingots, bracelets, and a lunula necklace.

According to Museum Wales, the Bronze Age, which took place between about 2300BC and 800 BC, saw jewellery used to display wealth and status.