Firearms Licensing

Jamie Stone Excerpts

Monday 23rd February 2026 Westminster Hall

[Ben Goldsborough]

I thank the hon. Gentleman; I think he has read a bit of my speech.

Technological change is introducing new risks. The conversion of blank-firing weapons and imitation firearms, and emerging technologies such as 3D printing, are changing the landscape of firearms crime. Such developments do not respect the boundaries of legislation written decades ago. We face a dual responsibility: we must protect public safety, and we must do so in a way that is fair, proportionate and grounded in evidence.

The petition before us, signed by more than 121,000 people, reflects genuine concern. Many petitioners fear that merging section 1 and section 2 licensing would increase bureaucracy, create delays and impose additional costs without delivering meaningful safety benefits. Those concerns are not just abstract; they reflect real frustrations with an already stretched licensing system. Many applicants experience long waits and many police forces face a capacity challenge. Will the Minister ensure that any proposed changes are accompanied by robust economic modelling, including of the potential impact on rural businesses, on employment and on participation?

[Jamie Stone (Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross) (LD)]

As Chair of the Petitions Committee, I can say that the hon. Gentleman is doing a damn good job of opening the debate. The Father of the House referred to farmers needing shotguns to control vermin. The crofters in my constituency have huge trouble with hooded crows, who come to peck out the eyes of lambs—no wonder they need their guns. I wish that Members from the Scottish National party were here today, because policing in the north of Scotland is a shadow of what it was, and the proposals would put an additional strain on those cops. They have not got the time to do all this.

[Ben Goldsborough]

I thank the hon. Member for that intervention.

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[Jamie Stone]

I think it is only fair that I offer an abject apology to the hon. Member, and a large refreshment will be his later today.

[Dave Doogan]

It is only fair that I accept both of those from the hon. Member. We are here because of the 121,000 signatures on the petition, and many of the constituencies with the highest counts of signatures are in Scotland, where gun ownership per capita is much higher than it is elsewhere in these isles, for entirely predictable and understandable reasons.

Angus and Perthshire Glens has the highest response rate in the United Kingdom; 550 opponents of the Government’s proposal have come forward from my constituency. They have good reason, because whether someone is up Glen Prosen, Glen Isla, Glen Clova, Glen Esk, or Glen Lethnot, or in Strathtay, Strathtummel or Strathmore, their possession, operation, use and discharge of their shotgun is just a part of everyday life. It is an essential tool for the maintenance of a rural way of living. As other right hon. and hon. Members have attested, concern is growing that perhaps this Government are not fully conversant—or nearly conversant enough—with what goes on in rural communities.

In terms of the evidence On public safety, I do not think that anybody in the Chamber is minded or motivated to get in the way of something that would improve firearms or shotgun control to protect the public. No one would object to that. What people in this Chamber, and many people outside it, object to is a vast increase in the bureaucratic burden that will deliver no significant increase in public safety.

As other Members have pointed out, during this debate we should remember those who have suffered at the hands of delinquent use of shotguns and firearms. That is vital, but so too is ensuring that any measures to modify the regulation around public safety are effective. Where it is seen to not be effective—and it is clearly demonstrated that these measures will not be effective—we should be very sceptical indeed.

I will not cover again the points that others have made on the well-documented difference in effect and lethality between firearms and shotguns. That substantial difference in lethality is why, dating back to 1920, they have been categorised differently. That difference has not changed; it is the same difference in 2026. If we look to tragedies such as that which happened in Plymouth, the problem that facilitated that tragedy was one not of regulatory impropriety, but of application of the regulation. If the regulation had been applied effectively in that instance, there is a good probability that that tragedy would never have happened.

Around 25% of firearms applications already take more than a year to process and 30 out of 43 police forces in England and Wales have missed the four-month processing target already. Licensing fees have risen by 133% and applying section 1 checks to all shotguns risks overwhelming an already underperforming system, which will present clear demonstrable challenges to our rural communities. Police Scotland operate a single national licensing unit, which consistently outperforms forces in England and Wales—I say that not as a cheap political point but because, quite clearly, if we centralise, standardise and properly resource the licensing regime, we will see substantial improvements in turnaround times.

As well as that, we need far more robust public protections. Do not let me forget to mention that, despite the work that Police Scotland’s licensing unit does, many of my constituents and others in Scotland still have to run the gauntlet with the general practice regime, which is by no means straightforward; that is certainly also something that should be looked at.

Strengthening firearms licensing units throughout the United Kingdom would be positive; standardisation of it would be positive; electronic record keeping would be positive, and so would closing the gaps in private shotgun sales by requiring sellers to verify buyer certificates directly with issuing police via a secure online portal. Those are all reasonable and practical changes that can be presumed to have a positive effect on the regime, in contrast to what the Government are proposing with their merger of the two sections.

Today’s debate is well attended and people are speaking passionately about the strength of feeling that they from their constituents all up and down these islands—mine included—that there is enough burden on ordinary people in rural communities trying to maintain the countryside in the way that we all expect them to. They are trying to make their farm businesses work properly and deal with the effects of challenges ranging from the family farm tax to employer national insurance contributions, and from the business property relief to the tax on crew cab pickups. Many people across rural Britain are thinking, “What next from central Government?”.

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[John Milne]

I think a trip to Northern Ireland is on offer to the Minister, and I am sure that she would have an excellent host in the hon. Gentleman.

[Jamie Stone]

I mentioned killing hooded crows in an earlier intervention, and I think one way that we could boost the industry that the hon. Member is talking about is by eating more game. I am not for one instant advocating eating hooded crows, or cormorants, which I am told they eat in Iceland—although I do not fancy one myself. But game is terribly good food, and children love it once they get a taste for it. I do not know why we do not offer pheasants on school menus. It would save the Exchequer a lot of money to eat the game that we shoot.

[John Milne]

I thank my hon. Friend for his suggestion. I am a big game meat fan, so I am certainly ready for that.

Moving to a centralised, fully digitised licensing body akin to the DVLA or the DBS, with real-time verification at the point of sale, would directly address weaknesses, improve consistency, reduce fraud and allow police forces to focus on law enforcement rather than administrative licensing functions. If we are serious about safety, that is where our attention should go. The wrong kind of reform could damage viable farm businesses and undermine food production for no clear benefit.

I urge the Government to listen carefully to rural communities, licensing professionals and the evidence. Let us modernise licensing and strengthen the medical safeguards. As a result, we will improve public safety while supporting this valuable industry and community.

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[Greg Smith (Mid Buckinghamshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Barker. I draw attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, and particularly to the deer management course that my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Blake Stephenson) also attended last December, which was hosted by the British Association for Shooting and Conservation. For transparency, I should also say that I am a member of the Countryside Alliance and of BASC, and both those memberships predate my election to this place. I myself shoot, and I am a shotgun certificate holder.

However, I have come to this debate to talk not about my own passion for shooting—even though I am my own MP—but about the importance that shooting has for my constituency. Some 477 constituents signed the petition, and I have had many emails from fellow shooters in the constituency, as well as from those considering taking up shooting, having their first go at a clay ground and applying for a shotgun certificate. Indeed, I cannot exemplify the importance of shooting to my constituency better than my constituent Stuart, who said that you only need to spot the game feeders in the fields from any train passing through Buckinghamshire to see how important shooting sports are in the constituency.

Of course, it is not just shooting sports that would be affected by the changes in the petition. As others have said eloquently throughout the debate, yes, it is about shooting sports; yes, it is about the clay grounds; yes, it is about game shooting; but it is also about farmers, pest control and predator control. It is about things like deer management, and if we did not have deer management and people willing to get a firearms licence to stop our countryside being overrun—people who often get called out by the police themselves to deal with a deer that might have been knocked over in the road and need humanely dispatching—we would be in great difficulty.

My hon. Friend the Member for Keighley and Ilkley (Robbie Moore) concluded by saying that the wider economic impact is not just on those who hold a shotgun certificate or a firearms licence; it is also on people such as David and Nicky Florent in my constituency, who run—despite its name, it is in Buckinghamshire—the Oxford Gun Company in the village of Oakley, which is a gun shop and shooting ground. They do sell not just shotguns, rifles, cartridges and ammunition, but the clothing ranges, boots, glasses, ear defenders and everything else that goes into shooting at large. That would be at risk if the change that is being consulted on by the Government, and that this petition is about, goes ahead.

As others have said, this change could lead to a huge number of people saying, “It’s just not worth it any more.” They would not put themselves through the process of renewing a shotgun certificate or even getting one in the first place. After the last significant reform of the licensing regime—back in 1988—there was a decline of about a third in the number of participants in shooting. Estimates out there suggest that this change from section 2 to section 1 would lead to a similar reduction in the number of people wishing to put themselves through the process of renewing their firearms licence.

[Jamie Stone]

The hon. Gentleman is talking about the benefits. At the moment, the United Kingdom has a stable system; he mentioned people thinking about taking up shooting, and we have a system whereby people are taught correctly, from the word go, to point their gun at the sky or at the ground and, when they finish shooting, to clean it, put it away and lock it up. Those are invaluable rules, and we should be very proud of how well we run things in the United Kingdom. I only have to go back to 2006, when Dick Cheney unfortunately managed to pepper somebody at a quail shoot in the United States. The safety standards we have in this country are the envy of the world.

[Greg Smith]

I absolutely agree with the hon. Gentleman; he puts it very well. Someone said earlier that holding a shotgun or a rifle is a privilege. Yes, it is a massive privilege, but it also comes with an absolutely ginormous responsibility, and I believe that everybody who legally holds a shotgun certificate or firearms licence takes that responsibility very seriously. They have often been taught from a young age the proper safety protocols around handling a firearm, and the importance of keeping it locked away and of cleaning it, which is important for one’s own safety when handling a firearm—if it is not clean, that can lead to significant problems. We should acknowledge just how seriously legitimate, legal, properly licensed shotgun and rifle owners in this country take their responsibilities. We all want a safe system; for those of us who have the privilege of owning a shotgun or a rifle—I do not have a firearms licence, and I have never applied for one—it is imperative that there is a safe system underpinning that, because it protects those who own them as well as those who do not.

My hon. Friend the Member for Broadland and Fakenham (Jerome Mayhew) went through the statistics in considerable detail, so I will not repeat them. It is worth acknowledging that our hearts go out to anyone who is affected by or a victim of a tragedy at the hands of someone wielding a firearm illegitimately—whether they somehow cheated the system and got a certificate or not. However, fatalities involving legally held firearms are extraordinarily rare: around one in 15 million annually, as other Members have said. The significance of that, which I do not think anyone else has mentioned in the debate, is that that falls far below the Health and Safety Executive’s intervention threshold of one in a million. That is not to say that there cannot be proportionate, evidence-based reforms to the licensing system. In many respects, there probably should be, to tweak it and make it safer. But what I do not see—I do not think anybody in the debate has advocated this—is that merging section 2 into section 1 will solve any problems or make anybody in our great country safer. It would, however, bring considerable cost and bureaucracy. I am lucky, with Thames Valley, to have one of the better-performing police force firearms licensing departments in the country. But as others have said, some forces have been found considerably wanting when it comes to new grants and renewal lead times.

On the other side of the coin is the enormous financial cost to our economy: shooting is worth £3.3 billion each year in its own right and generates £9.3 billion of wider benefits. My constituent Scott believes that merging sections 1 and 2 could cost £1 billion a year and 20,000 jobs, and evidence from the Countryside Alliance looking specifically at alignment between sections 2 and 1 shows that it would reduce the total value by £2.38 billion in the first year, with a loss of between 13,600 and 17,400 full-time jobs.

This debate is looking at a live consultation. I urge the Minister to stop and reflect on what she has heard this afternoon and what the shooting community in my—and I dare say in everybody’s—constituency is saying on this matter. As she goes through the process of reforming police forces, per se, she should perhaps pause any conversation on the changes until we know what those police forces will actually look like. I have heard arguments on the other side of the debate about a national firearms licensing scheme, and particularly that the existing system has local officers who, although they cannot know every certificate holder or licence holder in their constituency, are closer to the people they are licensing. The Minister should look at the bigger picture—where we have significant change to the policing landscape—and pause, look at the evidence, and understand the potential for significant damage to both safety and the economic survival of this sport and of wider conservation activity.

Finally, a lot has been said about this being an urban versus rural matter, but I do not believe that it is. My constituency is entirely rural. Yes, there are many shotgun certificate holders and firearms licence holders in my constituency, and there are clay grounds, many shoots and lots of farms. But if we look at the number of certificates issued across the country, this is just as important to many people who live in our cities. Every year, 21,000 certificates are issued by the Metropolitan police to London residents. This matters to people who shoot, no matter where they live. They might go to a game shoot or a clay ground in the countryside but live in our cities. This is far bigger than just a rural issue.