New government consultation threatens shotgun owners and could cause damage to our rural communities - Johnnie Furse

I’ve realised that intrinsic to Yorkshire’s iconic countryside are two industries: farming and shooting.

Without farmers, there would be no gambolling lambs, no green fields, no dry-stone walls. Without their hard work in providing us food, there would be no forced rhubarb, no Barnsley chops.

Without shoots, the UK economy would be £3.3bn worse off each year. More than 170,000 jobs would be lost. £500m of annual conservation work, vital to preserving our beautiful moorlands and dales, would disappear. Loss of rural business would be significant. Our celebrated village pubs struggle already and without these important customers, many would shut.

Both industries rely to a greater or lesser extent on shotguns. Their necessity to shooting goes without saying. For farmers, they are equally important. My neighbour, Mark Atkinson, is a farmer. This year he lost ten lambs in a fortnight, carried off and eaten by foxes.

At sowing times, pigeons and crows can devastate his germinating crops. Guns are very much necessary for farmers like Mark to protect their livelihoods.

A new government consultation, however, threatens shotgun owners, and could cause significant damage to our rural communities. Gun control is not usually a major political issue in Britain mainly because we do it quite well.

British firearms controls are among the most stringent in the world, and the statistics show that the current approach works. Deaths caused by guns in Britain are rare and the rate of all gun deaths is around 0.2 per hundred thousand of population compared to 1-1.5 in EU countries and 12 -14 in the United States. Despite this, the government is proposing to consult on further restrictions on the ownership of shotguns.

Ministers have taken the view that shotguns are no less lethal than other firearms, such as high-powered rifles used for deer management, which are controlled under Section 1 of the Firearms Act. It is therefore going to consult on greater alignment between the conditions for licensing shotguns and Section 1 firearms. This may even include additional restrictions on the storage of shotguns.

Licensing shotguns in the same way as Section 1 firearms would have a devastating impact on the countryside. It would add massively to the bureaucracy and cost of gun ownership, reduce the number of licence holders and create a significant new barrier to entry for all forms of shotgun shooting, but it would not address the fundamental problem, which is the licensing system, not the law.

For reasons that are lost in the mists of time firearms licensing is carried out by individual police forces which has created an archaic and dangerously inconsistent system of 43 separate licensing bodies. Yorkshire’s police forces are currently operating effective licensing operations, but others are not.

The killing of five people in Plymouth in 2021 by a licensed shotgun owner, who also killed himself, is referenced as justification for changes to the law on shotgun ownership, but that appalling incident was the result of shocking failures in licensing procedures, not of any weakness in the law.

The perpetrator should never have been granted a shotgun certificate in the first place, his certificate was withdrawn when he was investigated for an assault and then returned to him after he received a caution for battery. No law can protect the public if it is not implemented and as the inquest jury found there were “catastrophic failures” and a “seriously unsafe culture” in Devon and Cornwall Police’s firearms licensing unit.

The evidence very clearly shows that failures in the licensing system are the fundamental issue in many killings involving legally held guns. If the government is concerned about improving public safety it should, therefore, first be looking to create a single, centralised firearms licensing body with full digitisation to replace the current outdated system. An effective body like the DVLA would improve public safety, provide a consistent service for gun owners and allow police forces to focus on law enforcement, rather than licensing – a function they were never set up to deliver.

With the family farm tax, the closure of the SFI scheme, new compulsory purchase powers, and now this, rural communities have faced challenge after challenge in recent months.

If we want to protect areas like Yorkshire, we need to help the custodians of our precious countryside, not hinder them. To register your concerns with the government’s proposed consultation on shotgun ownership, please visit our website where You can lobby your MP to protect shooting from the Countryside Alliance website: www.countryside-alliance.org/firearms-licensing-2025

Johnnie Furse is from the Countryside Alliance.