Examination of Witnesses (Questions 200-204)
MR MARK
FUCHTER, MR
GUY WESTHEAD,
MR DAVID
RICHARDSON AND
MR DAVID
GREEN QC
1 MARCH 2007
Q200 Chairman: If we are talking
about 200,000 assault rifles, who is it who goes to the dealer
and says, "Oi, mate, what are you going to do with these
then?"?—
Q201 John Barrett: It is not yourselves.
Mr Fuchter: It would be our firearms
and explosives officers in the context of imports. I should stress
that we are not talking about one consignment here of 200,000
weapons. 90% of the consignments are of 100 or fewer. The point
you are making is probably more addressed by the overview taken
by the licensing police who deal with the totality of registered
firearms dealers' status and registration et cetera.
Q202 John Barrett: It is a bit of
a pressure for joined up government in this sense: I would like
to imagine that a quarter of a million assault rifles coming in
from Croatia and Bosnia were brought in to be melted down and
got rid of because they do not have facilities there to do it;
in the same way as we provided facilities in Sierra Leone to melt
down weapons where the collections had been organised. I would
not like to think that they had leaked on to the streets of my
constituency in Leeds, Manchester or London. I would like to know
if they have been sold back out from Bosnia to another country.
What we are saying is that we do not have an end-use check in
Britain and, at the same time, we are putting pressure on the
Home Office to cut down the number of guns in Britain.
Mr Fuchter: Some of the questions
you are looking to be addressed would be addressed by the police
licensing officer. Our powers stop at dealing with imports. Future
sales on are dealt with by the police licensing officer.
Q203 John Barrett: In the Home Office?
Mr Fuchter: Under Home Office
supervision, yes, very much so. I would like to assure the Committee
that there is more joined up government going on than I am painting
as a picture but once again I am constrained by the Commissioners
for Revenue and Customs Act in my ability to talk about individual
cases.
Q204 John Barrett: Could we ask a
question of the Home Office about their monitoring of the end-use?
Would that be the appropriate route for us as parliamentarians
to go down?
Mr Fuchter: That is very likely.
It is an issue I would like to talk to the Home Office about certainly
at enforcement policy level.
Chairman: Thank you very much indeed,
gentlemen. We are very grateful. There may be a few other questions
that we want to write to you about but we do not want to overburden
you. You have already kindly offered to write to us about a number
of issues. Thank you again and if there are further questions
we will write to you immediately and hopefully deal with them.
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