BASC goes behind the new gun tax proposal – interview - video Dailymotion

Fieldsports Channel

‘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 allays those fears. For the full story, visit https://fieldsportschannel.tv/guntax2025

Transcript

00:00Are we heading towards a license fee hike? The answer to that is yes and we've known that for

00:04some time because it was included in the Labour manifesto before the election. So I think it's

00:10important to say that all we have is one article in the Telegraph and it doesn't tell us everything

00:16we would want to know. We don't have a timeline there, we don't have a reasoning, we have a lot

00:23of rumour. So we need to first of all establish what's going on and BASC is engaged in doing that.

00:31But having said that, once we know, we can then start putting arguments in place and respond to

00:39something that has rather more gravitas about it than one article in the newspapers. On the

00:45principle of it, the government seems to be ignoring, the policing minister seems to be

00:52ignoring this point about firearms licensing is for public safety and not for the benefit of

00:59firearms certificate holders. On the reported comments in the Telegraph, I don't think she's

01:04ignoring it but I think she's got it wrong. So the first thing to say is the Firearms Act

01:12is quite clear that the licensing system is purely for the protection of public safety

01:20and we as people who shoot should support that because it protects us. None of us want to have

01:27people who shouldn't have guns with guns because that would threaten shooting itself. That's the

01:34first point. The second point to say is that hiking the license fee doesn't guarantee that

01:40any of that money reaches cash-strapped licensing departments because it all goes into the Police

01:47General Fund and there is no guarantee, because the money isn't ring-fenced, that it will go into

01:54licensing. And in terms of where money is distributed at present, I think the chances

02:00of it going into licensing are fairly remote in a number of constabularies that run firearms

02:06licensing departments. What would BASC like to see the government do about firearms licensing fees?

02:12I think to start off with, it is quite ridiculous to fund inefficiency and so the police have to

02:19sort out inefficient licensing departments before we get into the business of full-cost recovery.

02:27I think that the shooting community would be happy to pay for an efficient service. If this was

02:33happening with the passport service or with driver licensing, it would be completely unacceptable

02:42to have driver's licenses or passports delayed by more than a year. It's quite extraordinary

02:48that this happens with firearms licensing service. And how can we expect an inefficient service

02:55to actually protect public safety properly? So what we would want to see is those inefficiencies

03:02sorted out and then a transparent process that actually establishes what full-cost recovery

03:09should be. And the way you do that is by costing each element of the firearms licensing process

03:16and out of the end falls a just figure. What's your target for the length of time it should take

03:24to grant, renew, issue a variation for a firearm or grant a shotgun certificate? It should take a

03:31maximum of 17 weeks. Many constabularies do it much quicker. Warwickshire for example in 12 weeks.

03:38If they can do that, is that a system worth paying extra for? Yes is the answer. If we could ensure

03:47that all licensing departments were processing grants and renewals within 17 weeks, I think that

03:55is a system worth paying for at a transparent price. In other words, the process of deciding

04:02what that figure is, is transparent.

BASC goes behind the new gun tax proposal – interview

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