Significant increase in firearm licensing fees sees no promise of efficiency improvements
As CLA Chief Legal Adviser Andrew Gillett explains, the latest government licence fee increase will impact many rural landowners and businesses
The UK Government has made an announcement to significantly increase firearms licensing fees. The change is effective from 5 February 2025 and highlights a further blow dealt to rural constituents.
The scale of the increase, ranging from 111% to a huge 157%, does not address the deep-rooted inefficiencies in the current system and there is no guarantee the extra money raised will be ringfenced to help improve service levels. The CLA has long called for any increase to the fees to be evidence-led and to be done in lockstep with improvements in these inefficiencies.
By the government’s own impact assessment, these fees will directly hit 46,505 farming businesses across England and Wales as well as 3,500 gamekeepers, not to mention hundreds of foresters, deer stalkers and pest controllers.
The updated fee structure includes:
- Firearms certificate grant: from £88 to £198 (125% increase)
- Firearms certificate renewal: from £62 to £131 (111% increase)
- Shotgun certificate grant: from £79.5 to £194 (144% increase)
- Shotgun certificate renewal: from £49 to £126 (157% increase)
Such a significant increase is being framed as necessary for "full cost recovery". This is unjustifiable due to the inefficiencies in the current licensing process, some regions can take up to two years to process applications. The fees collected do not directly feed back into improving the licensing process since they go into general police budgets. We have seen no assurance that the increase will be ringfenced either to assist understaffed firearms teams or to improve the systems and processes that support them.
The government’s impact assessment sets out that full cost recovery should be the norm and references HM Treasury’s ‘Managing Public Money’ to justify this. While this is correct, it fails to reference that just after the document first mentions “full cost recovery” in the text it goes on to state: “as elsewhere, organisations supplying public services should always seek to control their costs so that public money is used efficiently and effectively.”
This announcement has also come with little or no consultation with stakeholders or the public – not to be expected for such changes.
The CLA would like to see any fee increase being evidence led, following meaningful consultation and with genuine improvements in service delivery and transparency baked into the proposals.
