A senior curator at the National Gallery has told the Guardian that outsourced security guards, most of whom are from minority ethnic backgrounds, are effectively segregated from the gallery's mainly white in-house staff. While employees such as curators and marketing staff use a bright, well-equipped "hub" with a subsidised canteen, security guards are confined to a cramped basement area described as dingy, unventilated and infested with rodents, unable even to sit in the staff hub during breaks.

The gallery has cited overcrowding as the reason for excluding guards from the hub, but staff note this restriction applies even at weekends and holidays when few employees are present, and that of roughly 60 guards on site, only a handful take breaks simultaneously. The PCS union, which represents the security staff, wrote to the gallery's director on 1 July arguing the arrangement could be discriminatory under the Equality Act 2010, and is still awaiting a response; it also warned that stretching guards across up to four rooms at once risks the safety of the collection, pointing to past incidents such as the Just Stop Oil attacks on Van Gogh's Sunflowers and Velázquez's Rokeby Venus.