Law and out of order
David Frost says numerous police forces in England and Wales are flouting the law when it comes to firearms licensing and a robust response is required
I’ve written before about police forces that flout the law relating to firearms. Sadly, the situation is getting worse. As I write, 20 forces in England and Wales have decided to ignore Section 26 of the Firearms Act 1968 and to disregard both the official guidance in respect of non-statutory forms and the April 2016 medical agreement by demanding a doctor’s letter before accepting an application.
Nowhere does the law require a GP’s letter as part of the certification process and asking for one as a condition of accepting the application breaches Section 26 of the act. The Home Office has remained silent on this clear violation of its guidelines and the law. The police Firearms and Explosives Licensing Working Group (FELWG) has failed to demonstrate any meaningful leadership.
Public safety
The police will piously tell you this is all to do with public safety but it’s largely a buckpassing exercise as this email to me from a firearms licensing manager shows: “We are of the view that having notified your doctor of the issue or renewal of a certificate, they now hold a portion of the duty of care.” This is why some GPs refuse to co-operate.
Nor is this the first time forces have invented their own law. A freedom of information request in 2011 revealed that more than 12,000 certificate holders were in unlawful possession of their guns due to delays in renewing certificates. At least five chief constables were happy to endorse this breach of the law and some forces, including one of the aforementioned 20, were still doing so in 2016.
BASC recently published its annual league table showing how long forces took in 2019 to grant and renew certificates. Durham, where the chairman of FELWG resides, is among the worst 10, as is Avon and Somerset, where the previous chairman is now the chief constable. What an appalling example to set. The only positive is that neither force is among the 20.
Offenders
Durham is a pretty hopeless force when it comes to licensing. When I looked at their web page while writing this I found they still want four photos when only one is now needed; the information about calibres for deer is more than a decade out of date; the information about deactivated weapons is out of date; in Durham, though not in the rest of the UK, it is apparently still illegal to shoot game without a game licence. You’d have thought the national lead for firearms licensing could have got all that right. They also have an “Other Residents” form which is not marked as non-statutory though the
website says completion is not mandatory. Unhelpfully, it doesn’t say what it’s for.
The staff who deal with licensing are unlikely to have any nationally accredited training qualification. HM Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services has been banging on about the need for formal training since 1993. It reiterated the point in 2002 and again in 2015. Four years later the police eventually got around to introducing a scheme but it’s not obligatory and few have completed it. How can there be a good national service without proper training?
Nor are all firearms enquiry officers (FEO) pillars of rectitude. In 2010, two Durham FEOs, Maurice Allen and Damian Cobain, were convicted of misconduct in public office for selling guns that had been handed in for destruction. In 2019, Paul Duffield, a North Yorkshire FEO and former police officer, was jailed for misconduct and firearms offences. Can you be sure the FEO who does your certificate is law abiding and honest?
Nor do the police always do the job properly. In South Yorkshire in 2013, certificate holders were asked to provide a list of all the guns they held. No reason was given for this unlawful demand and it was opposed by the shooting groups. I eventually elicited the information that a member of staff (who was later disciplined) had failed to enter the relevant information into the computer system. If they’d come clean at the outset, they would have been helped by the shooting groups.
Advice
Despite all this, not enough is being done by the shooting organisations to hold the police to account. There is no shooting representative on FELWG. We share a common interest in an efficient service that furnishes certificates promptly to those entitled to them under the law. Only once has the chairman of FELWG met collectively with the shooting organisations but this needs to become a regular event.
The advice I get from a shooting judge and a specialist barrister is that the stance taken by the 20 forces is in contravention of Section 26 of the act, which clearly states that applications have to be made in the prescribed form and that does not include a GP’s letter. Interestingly, the original act in 1920 merely required applications to be made to the police. Clearly this did not work, presumably because forces applied different criteria, which is why the present wording was adopted in 1937.
BASC has taken oral advice from an unnamed QC to the effect that a judicial review would not succeed but the reasons for this are not adequately explained. In these circumstances, oral advice is not worth the paper it’s not written on, but it has undoubtedly encouraged the police to flout the law in the certain knowledge they will not be challenged. We need to be more robust in defending our interests.
“Not enough is being done by the shooting organisations to hold the police to account”