‘Rural communities face steep ‘gun tax’ rise to boost police budgets’: That’s the headline in the Daily Telegraph, prompting fears among gun owners that they will be asked to pay for public safety.
BASC’s Christopher Graffius (interview above) allays those fears. He says: “All we have is one article in the Telegraph and it doesn’t tell us everything that we would want to know. We don’t have a timeline there, we don’t have any reasoning, we have a lot of rumour, so we need first of all to establish what’s going on.”
The story arises from a statement that policing minister Dame Diana Johnson made on 17 December 2024 in the House of Lords about future funding for the police in England and Wales. The statement says: “Firearms licensing fees have not increased since 2015, and are now significantly less than the cost of the service provided by police forces. This funding deficit is impacting the effectiveness of police firearms licensing controls and the crucial role they play in safeguarding the public.
“We therefore intend to lay a statutory instrument, when parliamentary time allows, to increase firearms licensing fees to provide full-cost recovery for police forces, in line with our manifesto commitment. The additional revenue raised will be retained by police forces to support the important improvements needed in firearms licensing.”
Campaigners warn that Home Office plans could see the cost of new firearms licences more than quadruple to £400. Graffius says BASC expects there to be a rise in licensing fees, but on certain conditions. He says: “The Firearms Act is quite clear that the licensing system is purely for the protection of public safety and we, as people who shoot, should support that because it protects us.
“Hiking the licence fee doesn’t guarantee that any of that money reaches cash-strapped licensing departments, because it all goes into the police general fund. I think the chances of it going into licensing are fairly remote.
“It is quite ridiculous to fund inefficiency, so the police have to sort out inefficient licensing departments before we get into the business of full cost recovery. I think that the shooting community would be happy to pay for an efficient service.
“If this were happening with the passport service or driver licensing, it would be completely unacceptable.”
The move to increase the ‘gun tax’ is expected to raise £20 million. The government will make a decision in 2025. While Dame Diana’s statement relates to the Provisional Police Grant Report (England and Wales) 2025-26, the final report will be laid before the House of Lords in following the ‘period of consultation’.
BASC is lobbying for the government to improve certificate grants, renewals and variations to take a maximum of 17 weeks. “If we could ensure that all licensing departments were processing grants and renewals within 127 weeks, I think that is a system worth paying for at a transparent price – in other words: the process of deciding that figure is transparent,” says Graffius.
