Hallmarking down 13% compared to last year

Hallmarking figures for the month of April has shown a 13.2% decrease when compared to the same period last year.

Figures from the Birmingham Assay office showed there was a decrease among all metals apart from silver, which saw an increase of 19.2%. There were 62,636 more silver pieces hallmarked bringing the number up to 389,707.

Gold suffered the largest drop with a decrease of 37.5%, whereas platinum and palladium fell by 13.6% and 32.1% respectively.

In March, there was a total of 732,776 hallmarked articles whereas April recorded 686,039.

Compared to the same period last year, April saw hallmarking drop by 104,555 articles.