Reposted from the Daily Mail

MPs voiced bewilderment today after it emerged that more than 220 works of art have gone missing from the Parliamentary collection.

A huge haul of paintings, etchings and prints are unaccounted for - with the authorities at the House blaming database errors but admitting they do not know whether they have been stolen.

Some of the missing works are thought to be worth thousands of pounds. 

The issue, revealed after a Freedom of Information request by MailOnline, sparked calls from politicians for action.

There are some 9,000 works of art in the Parliamentary collection - which started to be assembled in 1841.

The works recorded as 'missing' include a wartime oil painting by William John MacLeod titled Burning of the Debating Chamber from Star Chamber Court

There are more than 6,000 paintings and prints, hundreds of busts, statues, tapestries and mosaics.

The total value of the collection has not been formally estimated but it is thought to be well over £10million. 

More than 80 per cent are on show on the Westminster estate, with the rest supposedly in storage. 

But according to the information disclosed by the Parliamentary authorities 224 works are recorded on the collection database as 'missing'.

They include a wartime oil painting by William John MacLeod titled Burning of the Debating Chamber from Star Chamber Court. 

A watercolor of 'The Landing Place from the River Thames' by William Capon - whose paintings can fetch thousands of pounds at auction - is unaccounted for.

A portrait of William Pitt the Younger by Robert Dighton, another sought after artist, is also on the list released by Parliament. 

Other painters whose works have gone AWOL include Philip Mount, Robert Soden, William Alister Macdonald, and Robert Blemmell Schnebbelie.

Scores of drawings, lithographs, engravings, etchings and aquatints have been recorded as astray.

A sketch by John Stanton Ward of a Principal Doorkeeper in the House of Lords has not been located. His paintings have sold for £5,000.

A cartoon by famous Daily Express cartoonist Carl Giles is also among the apparent casualties.

The FOI response said: 'An indication of whether these pieces are considered either lost or stolen is not held by the House.'

The authorities said the 'missing' tag dated from the 1980s when there was a 'less reliable' database.  

They said it was not known whether the 'problem' items - the total value of which is unknown - had genuinely disappeared or had been wrongly recorded.

'We now use a Museum standard database and have succeeded in resolving many of the inherited anomalies, however identifying them is a labour-intensive process,' the statement added.

A portrait of William Pitt the Younger by Robert Dighton, another sought after artist, is also on the list released by Parliament

Parliamentary officials are hoping the pending multi-billion restoration project at the Palace of Westminster will allow them to track down some of the missing works.

'The Restoration and Renewal program is an important opportunity for the Parliamentary Art Collection to be reviewed in detail so that historic cataloging errors can be resolved and good documentation practice going forward can be ensured,' the response added. 

Tory MP Sir Oliver Heald said he was 'very surprised' by the extent of the missing works of art.

'I will certainly be writing to the Speaker to see what has been going on here,' he told MailOnline.

'These things can be worth quite a lot of money.' 

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