Offensive Weapons Bill

Lord Robertson of Port Ellen Excerpts

Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 6th February 2019 Grand Committee

We need to keep this under review. Things change from time to time. Fashions change. Ways in which people choose to commit crime change. At the moment, on the evidence that I have, and I have done my best to ask the Government to show us their evidence, although I have not got much from them, which I suspect is because they do not have much evidence—

[Lord Robertson of Port Ellen (Lab)]

I am listening to what the noble Lord is saying and the assumptions he is making about the guns that are being talked about—or in this case, not talked about—and them not falling into the wrong hands. Why does he think the Home Secretary of this country said in the House of Commons that,

“according to intelligence provided by police and security services”,

these .50 calibre guns,

“have been possessed by criminals who have clearly intended to use them”?—[Official Report, Commons, 27/6/18; col. 919.]

Does the noble Lord have better information and intelligence than the Home Secretary?

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

My Lords, if I might help my noble friend, it is possible that Ministers and Members in another House have been slightly inaccurately briefed. For instance, they were told that the effective range of a .50 calibre round is 6,800 metres, whereas in actual fact, it is only about 1,800 metres.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I was talking about the two forms of rifle which are specifically addressed in the Bill. These are not .50 calibre rifles, but lighter ones, which are adapted for use by disabled people and make it easier to reload the round using power derived from the previous shot. That is a .50 calibre, but again, the calibre alone does not tell you all you need to know about the rifle; you need to know whether a particular weapon is dangerous. The weapons used in target shooting tend to be heavy and cumbersome and the ammunition is not the same as that used in military operations.

I have asked for evidence. There may be evidence out there, but it has not made its way to me. My particular arguments are about the guns addressed in the Bill, as there is no evidence of misuse of those guns or available evidence showing that these are fundamentally more dangerous than other rifles. There is also no evidence that they cannot be properly secured through a mixture of physical security and the systems we have to ensure that firearms are only held by the people who ought to hold them.

[Lord Robertson of Port Ellen]

Before Hungerford and Dunblane, there had not been evidence of legally held handguns being used to massacre people. However, Hungerford and Dunblane happened, and after that, we passed legislation and the country is much safer as a result.

[Lord Lucas]

Absolutely. We need to keep these things under consideration. However, if one took the noble Lord’s argument to its logical conclusion, we would ban cars because they have been used deliberately to kill people. Any kind of weapon, including knives, presents a danger to the public. Because there is a legitimate use for these objects, we choose to look at how to balance the potential danger with the potential good. I hope that we will choose to do it on the basis of evidence, which says, yes, these things are dangerous, but we have systems in place which negate that danger. Rules on the weapons the public may hold legitimately, plus the safeguards we take, mean this is not the route through which weapons reach the people who will misuse them. In society as a whole, we have adopted a system which is safe and which allows us to live with the existence of those weapons. It seems to me that the evidence says that is the case at the moment. We do not have a recent history of misuse—of any degree at all—of the weapons which are currently allowed.

It is important to keep these things under review, but it is also important to be sensible. A lot of what is in our lives is dangerous. It is the business of legislators to balance that danger with utility and reach a conclusion; there are lots of different conclusions that can be reached. If we say that people are to have weapons of any description, it seems to me that the current arrangements for allowing people to have firearms are working very well. There is no evidence that incremental banning of particular types of firearm will produce any benefit at all and, as a matter of principle, we ought to take those sorts of decisions based on evidence, rather than because someone feels like it somewhere and no one quite knows why because it is buried in the decision-making processes that created this Bill.

My appeal to my noble friend is that we ought to be looking at where this process is going in the long term, at what we should be doing to make sure that firearms can be legally held, and at the security we want around that. Then, when we arrive at that conclusion, we can show that the weapons which fit within that are not a source of danger to the public, by their nature, because they are not what people who wish to commit crimes will go for.

A lot of guns are being recovered by the police, and by and large they are illegal guns because the guns that are being brought in are much more suitable for use in crime. People will not go for a hunting rifle to commit crime with. We are not talking about hunting rifles in the Bill, but the same considerations apply. If hunting rifles were being widely used in crime, we would be fussed about it, but they are not. The rifles that are the subject of this Bill are not used in crime. There is no instance of them being used in crime. There is nothing obvious about them which makes them more dangerous than other firearms in the context of the controls that we have. As a result of the deliberations in another place, our concerns about .50 calibre are under review. We ought to do the same with the other rifles that are mentioned here and come to a coherent, evidenced conclusion about where in this society we now choose to draw the line on the firearms that people may legally hold and on the purposes for which they may legally hold them. I am not saying that there is an absolute value to any particular place to draw the line; I am saying that we ought to do this on the basis of evidence, and nothing that my noble friends have been able to provide me with at the moment offers evidence that the rifles we are discussing pose any greater danger than the many other rifles that we permit people to hold. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Robertson of Port Ellen]

I appreciate what the Minister is saying but this is a critical part of the legislation, where some strong views are held on both sides. Having sat through the debate so far, I also appreciate that we want to finish the business. I am not an expert in this field but I know that there are many experts around, who will undoubtedly contribute. This matter has excited a lot of interest outside the House.

First, I am not anti-target shooting. I was a member of the House of Commons rifle club, when it existed, and went target shooting in the subterranean depths of this building. Of course, I was Defence Secretary and then Secretary-General of NATO so I must have ordered huge quantities of guns of every description. As I said at Second Reading, I am a resident of Dunblane and became deeply engaged in the debate that took place after that shooting. I would contradict what was said about the banning of the private ownership of handguns leading to an increase in the amount of crime involving them. My colleague, the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, who has now left, also disagreed with that.

I am here to probe the issue of .50 calibre guns. In other contexts, they would be known colloquially as sniper rifles; they certainly have a destructive power over very long distances. I want to pray in aid what was said by the Home Secretary. I am not normally a great disciple of his—I think that he is running for Prime Minister at the moment, or at least leader of the Conservative Party when the vacancy eventually and inevitably occurs—but, as the Home Secretary, he has access to a lot of information that the rest of us do not. So, when he comes to the House of Commons and makes Statements, we should listen carefully.

We should also listen to what the Home Office had to say in preparation for the Bill. The department produces impact assessments—a very good innovation, whenever they were brought in, to describe the impact of legislation on costs, society and provisions on law and order. An impact assessment was done on .50 calibre rifles but, oddly enough, it is not in the Printed Paper Office. An impact assessment on the knife aspect of the Bill is available, but not one on the part about guns. If I can read its very small writing, the impact assessment which I found on the internet states:

“There is concern about the availability of .50 calibre and rapid-fire Manually Actuated Release System (MARS) rifles”—


as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas—

“being available to some civilian firearms licence holders. The range and penetrative power of 0.50 calibre rifles makes them more dangerous than other common firearms and were they to be used in criminal or terrorist activities would present a serious threat to the public and would be uniquely difficult for the police to control. Due to the rate of discharge MARS rifles pose a comparable risk to the public and police as other self-loading weapons already banned in the UK. The Government need to intervene to ensure the purchase, ownership or possession is illegal”.

That Home Office impact assessment was delivered to the Government in preparation for the legislation.

In the House of Commons, the Home Secretary said when he presented the Bill:

“We based those measures on evidence that we received from intelligence sources, police and other security experts … According to the information that we have, weapons of this type have, sadly, been used in the troubles in Northern Ireland, and, according to intelligence provided by police and security services, have been possessed by criminals who have clearly intended to use them”.—[Official Report, Commons, 27/6/18; cols. 918-19.]


These are not my words or an exaggeration by anti-gun campaigners, but the words of the Home Secretary. He did not resile from these comments when he withdrew the clause from the Bill, under pressure from a large number of Back-Bench Conservative MPs. All he has said is that the matter would be subject to further consultation. The danger between now and the end of the consultation is represented precisely by the Home Secretary’s warning. I hope the Minister will be able to explain why the Committee should listen to outside experts when the Home Secretary of this country has given such a graphic description of the dangers presented by these weapons.

[Earl Attlee]

My Lords, I hold the noble Lord in very high regard, but is he saying that Ministers and their advisers are infallible?

[Lord Robertson of Port Ellen]

They are certainly not infallible—I speak from great experience on that— but the Home Secretary clearly did not come to the House of Commons unprepared and without checking thoroughly in advance. His statements are clearly there. His predecessor was misled and she resigned. I do not think that the present Home Secretary is likely to make that mistake again or that he has been misled; he said what he believed and what he had been told.

[Viscount Goschen (Con)]

My Lords, I will make a brief intervention in this debate. I declare an interest as a holder of a firearms certificate and the owner of a number of rifles, none of which would come anywhere near the type of muzzle energy we are talking about.

I support the description of our firearms licensing regime given by my noble friend Lord Lucas. It is generally accepted internationally that the UK has one of the most rigorous and best informed firearms licensing regimes in the world. It is also generally accepted that the shooting community respects and understands that the holding of a firearms certificate is a privilege that can be removed. Because of that, they are a very law-abiding section of the community. They are acutely aware that their sport and activity can be curtailed should they be involved in criminal activity entirely unrelated to the use of their firearms.

With that in mind, we have to be a bit careful of banning things because they are an easy target—forgive the pun. It is easy to work out where a particular category of firearm is and remove it from circulation. I hold no particular candle for the .50 calibre rifle and I am open to arguments about where the line should be drawn, because one indeed has to be drawn somewhere. We have acted in the past regarding handguns, fully automatic weapons and a number of other eventualities, but I very much support my noble friend Lord Lucas’s contention that before we ban something we have to have a closely argued, coherent case that is evidence based. Just banning something because we feel like it or because it is easy to do should not be a proper course of action.

Debate on the Bill has, on the one hand, largely been about very large numbers of people carrying knives, often using them and being closely tied up with the criminal fraternity, particularly drug dealers. On the other hand, the Bill talks about banning the use of a piece of equipment that is legally held when no recorded crime has ever been committed using a legally held rifle of such high-muzzle energy, as far as I understand it. I am open to correction by my noble friend and other Members of the Committee. We have to be very careful about that. Where do we draw the line?

I quite accept what the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, said: these are weapons of very high power and very high destructive capability. That is absolutely correct. On the other hand, their utility for criminals is much lower than that of many other sniper rifles. He described them as sniper rifles, and indeed they are. But they are not the typical sniper rifles used by the British Army, which are in calibres much closer to sporting rifles and are much smaller pieces of equipment. We have to put this in perspective and look at the actual threat.

When the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, referred to what was worrying the Home Secretary about these rifles, it occurred to me to question whether he was worried about the theft of these 130 or so rifles, a tiny number, or about one of those firearm certificate holders turning bad. Or was it really about someone purchasing one of these—in America, for example—and turning it into a small number of machinery components, putting them in a container and smuggling them in, as a vast number of illegally held pistols arrive in this country. The real danger faced on the streets is from illegally held weapons, not legally held weapons.