Looking for Treasure…

by Tess Machling

[A download/print PDF version can be found at the end of the paper]

Introduction

Following on from my blog last week, I have been trying to find out exactly how much is being paid out each year to individuals and landowners in ‘rewards’ for their ‘Treasure’ finds. This information is not straightforward to locate, but what I have found does not make for happy reading.

According to my calculations, Treasure appears to have cost us – museums and the British public – around £7 million in 2023 and the significant rise in this figure over the last few years shows no signs of abating. Museums are currently under huge financial pressure with many staff being laid off, and museums closed, so to put the Treasure reward figures in context: we are looking at around 150-250 museum curators who could have been salaried for the amount paid out in 2023. Instead, this ‘reward’ money was paid out to individual finders and landowners as cash gifts for their hobby.

Data sources.

Data regarding Treasure finds comes from two sources, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), in the form of the annual Statistical Releases for Reported Treasure Finds and from the British Museum based, Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) Annual Reports and Treasure Reports. Both outputs have a significant reporting lag, with the latest DCMS statistical release from November 2024 covering Treasure reported in 2022 and 2023, and the latest PAS Treasure Act 1996 Annual Report from February 2025, covering finds reported in 2022.

This lag and different reporting periods makes interrogation of the information regarding Treasure find rewards/valuations very difficult and it should be noted that everything I say in the rest of this blog is me doing ‘back of fag packet’ calculations with what little data is available. That’s why I’ve rounded up figures or given a ball park amount. However, I do believe that by looking at these figures over the six years between 2018 and 2023 suggests that my numbers are accurate enough to be able to show trends.

Within the overall PAS reports, cash values are never mentioned, with glossy pics of fabulous finds the norm. Even within the DCMS statistical reports, the rather icky business of how much this has all cost is never mentioned.

Treasure Act 1996 Annual Report 2022

The latest PAS Treasure report, for 2022, does give some financial information, contained in a rather misleading table (below) which at first glance would suggest that this was the amount of money paid out in Treasure rewards for that year. Indeed, this is a figure I have seen given by several people on social media recently.

However, by adding up the valuations given at the end of the report under ‘List of all cases reported potential Treasure in 2022’, this figure seems to include around £6400 of finds which were donated to museums for free and around £50,300 of finds where museums who had expressed an interest, withdrew from buying the finds [perhaps due to the costs becoming clear only after valuation or because their financial circumstances changed? There is no way of knowing but either way that’s £50k of finds that went back to finders, or to the market, when museums clearly wanted them…]

So what the £138,155 figure actually reflects is only around £82,000 worth of finds that had been found, processed AND acquired within 2022 – only just over 100 finds of the 1377 Treasure finds reported in 2022. From what I can see of the descriptions of these finds, as you would expect, these are the lower value finds, where processing was straightforward and could be achieved quickly. But what happened to the rest?

The Treasure Valuation Committee Minutes

The most detailed source of information as regards Treasure are the publicly available minutes of the Treasure Valuations Committee (TVC): a group of finds, museum and antiquities market specialists who meet several times a year to consider Treasure finds and who make recommendations to the Secretary of State as to what ‘reward’ should be paid, and any ‘abatements’ (deductions) that should be made to that reward (for example, if a find had been illegally excavated, if the finder did not have landowner’s permission, etc etc then the amount of the reward can be reduced or nullified).

Each meeting of the TVC considers finds from multiple years and, as such, is a rolling record of finds as they come through the Treasure system, in most cases (unless a finder later decides to donate for free, or a museum cannot raise funds to acquire) the final stage before a reward is sent to finders and landowners.

Within these minutes, there are recommended cash figures of all cases considered at that meeting and – in the absence of any figures from DCMS saying exactly how much was paid out in rewards in any given year – are a good proxy.

By going through these minutes and adding up the ‘recommended’ valuations, I came up with the following figures as to how much money was recommended to be paid out within that year. As this is very much a ‘woman with calculator’ exercise, I have rounded up the figures to the nearest thousand:

In graph form:

It should be noted that the figure for 2020, the year of Covid lockdowns, is highly unrepresentative and the TVC met only three times that year as opposed to the usual seven or eight times.

As can be seen since 2020, when so many first discovered the detecting hobby, the amount of treasure being valued has rocketed from around £1 million per year in 2021 to £2 million in 2022, and £7.1 million in 2023. The 2023 figures include the £4.3 million Chew Valley hoard found in Bristol in 2019, which took four years to proceed through the system to recommended reward in 2023.

Although the 2024 figures are not yet available, a baseline of around at least £2-3 million seems probable, and with the 2019 discovered £3.5 million price tagged ‘Tudor Heart’ locket having been valued in 2024 (and currently being fundraised for), a figure of c. £6-7 million seems likely.

I also suspect that there may be many other high value finds lurking in the backlogged system that may yet mean much higher figures in the coming years…

Conclusion

The figures above do not include the 50% of finds which were disclaimed, often because museums could not afford them. Many of these disclaimed finds will also have been sold on, at a profit, by these same hobbyists. When you add in the hundreds of thousands of non-Treasure finds which will have ended up in private collections or on eBay the figures being made in selling our shared heritage are incomprehensible.

In the case of Treasure, we are looking at museums, their supporters, members of the public and overstretched grant funding bodies picking up the tab for the lucky finds of a few individuals carrying out their hobby. Over the last six years we appear to have paid out around £12 million to these people.

Me? I’d much rather have the curators keep their jobs…

[Footnote: I’ve put in a Freedom of Information request to DCMS and the British Museum and asked them how much money was paid out in Treasure rewards for each year between 2020 and 2024. I shall of course report back as soon as I hear anything. Until then, if you’d like to support my work as an unfunded independent researcher, then please buy me a ‘coffee’. Thank you 🙂 ]