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Earl Peel moved Amendment No. 20:
After Clause 5, insert the following new clause--
(" . The authority of the Secretary of State is not required by virtue of section 5 of the 1968 Act for a registered firearms dealer to have in his possession, purchase, acquire, sell or transfer a firearm or ammunition which is prohibited by section 1 or section 25 of this Act for the purpose of selling or transferring that firearm or ammunition to a person who may by the provisions of this Act lawfully possess, purchase or acquire it.").
The noble Earl said: This is a small but, we hope, important amendment. It attempts to achieve a simpler process for those individuals referred to as special exemptions under the Bill to acquire the necessary weapons for their various activities. There is a real possibility that dealers faced with the requirement to apply for a Section 5 licence may decide not to bother because of the additional bureaucracy combined with the fact that they may be unlikely to sell many of those weapons due to a low demand. There may be large areas of the country--I think in particular of rural areas--where, for example, vets need special weapons to destroy animals where necessary. They would have great difficulty in finding a dealer to supply them with the various weapons that they need.
Bearing in mind that anyone termed as a special exemption under the Bill would have to apply for a licence, I do not think that this provision would be regarded as a breach of security. I very much hope that my noble friend can accept the amendment. I beg to move.
Baroness Blatch: I am afraid that I may disappoint my noble friend. I believe that the amendment would create a huge loophole in the general requirement for dealers to have the Secretary of State's authority to deal in prohibited weapons.
We are not prepared to make any concessions for dealers who deal in prohibited handguns. Dealers who wish to sell prohibited weapons of any sort must apply for the Home Secretary's authority to do so under Section 5(1) of the Firearms Act 1968.
I appreciate that it may cause some inconvenience for people who will have to find a dealer with Section 5 authority. But we are not aware that the current requirements cause particular problems. For example, vets are able to get hold of tranquillising weapons.
However, we accept that the position is a little different for dealers who sell expanding ammunition, the ban on which will be extended by the Bill. The current Firearms Acts already allow dealers to sell expanding pistol ammunition to those who are authorised to possess it on a specially conditioned firearm certificate. The Bill does not change that. However, we have received representations from dealers who need to use expanding ammunition because they manufacture, test or repair firearms which use expanding ammunition. We are therefore prepared to allow firearms dealers who need to use expanding ammunition for this purpose to have it without the Secretary of State's authority and, again, I promise to bring forward an amendment to this effect on Report.
Earl Peel: I am grateful to my noble friend for what she is doing as regards expanding ammunition. It was causing a great deal of concern. I understand the position that she takes. I believe that there is a real likelihood that difficulties will be caused. I understand the Government's position. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Clause 6 [Having small-calibre pistol outside premises of licensed pistol club]:
Lord Pearson of Rannoch moved Amendment No. 21:
The noble Lord said: My name is on the Marshalled List and I wish to move Amendment No. 21. This amendment is the so-called disabling or disassembling amendment. It proposes that permitted handguns should be dismantled with only the slide assembly or cylinder being stored at licensed premises. The remainder of the weapon could be kept at home. This would obviously make first-class security at gun clubs very much cheaper, allowing most of them, perhaps all of them, to survive. So the Treasury, or the taxpayer, would save a lot of money that it would otherwise have to pay in compensation. Security would in fact be improved because there would be no arsenals of complete weapons all over the country with their attendant security risk however much is done to protect them.
Since Clause 6 is now not to be considered by a Committee of this House, I trust that your Lordships will forgive me if I deal with the desirability of disassembly in some detail.
The Bill prohibits handguns except those provided for in Clause 1(2) and Clauses 2 to 5. One of the categories included in Clause 1(2) and defined in Clause 1(8) is called a small-calibre pistol. This gun is a sort of half-way house. It is not prohibited, but it is subject to extra controls of a draconian kind. In particular, Clause 6 makes it an offence to possess it outside the licensed premises of a licensed club. It cannot be stored at home or carried from club to club; it will be the only permitted gun not allowed to be kept at home. The purpose of the amendment is to change that offence so that the owner may possess the gun outside the licensed premises provided that its key component is stored there. That is what we mean by "dismantlement". The key component, the slide assembly or cylinder, will be kept at the club and the remainder of the gun at home. That was the option preferred by Lord Cullen.
It should be made clear that this amendment makes no commitment on the desirability or otherwise of permitting only .22 rimfire pistols. There are those who remain opposed to this limitation, believing that there is no justification for the ban on higher calibres. But this amendment does not contribute to that debate. The amendment says that whatever calibre the House decides, whether .22 or higher, dismantlement is the best way of control. There is no reason, therefore, why noble Lords who wish to ban pistols above .22 should oppose this proposal.
Let us look at the Cullen Report and the Government's response to it so far. Lord Cullen states, at paragraph 9.106:
The recommendation has a number of obvious advantages. It is quicker and easier to implement. It will save expenditure by clubs on increased security and prevent many from closing down. It saves the Treasury money by way of proper compensation. It will diminish the risk of terrorist and criminal attacks on arsenals of weapons. So it is safer than what is proposed in the Bill. The recommendation continues to fulfil the central purpose of the Bill: to separate the owner from his pistol or revolver, except within a club, as a safeguard against another terrible tragedy such as Dunblane.
It is worth remembering the present law on component parts. Buying spares without authority is already illegal. The two parts to which Lord Cullen referred, the slide assembly or cylinder, are already controlled by law. They are pressure bearing component parts of the gun which it is impossible to buy or possess without entering it on your firearms certificate. Any additional slide assembly or cylinder requires the consent of the chief officer of police because it requires him to grant a variation of the original certificate. From the point of view of the present law, there is no difference between buying another gun and buying a replacement slide assembly or cylinder.
I submit that the Government have so far failed to show the impracticality of that suggestion. They began indeed by suggesting that dismantlement was impracticable. Their response to Lord Cullen's report said (at paragraph 24, page 5, on 16th October):
The evidence on which the Government's statement relied consisted of a letter from a Mr. Warlow of the Forensic Science Service. This letter has become somewhat notorious, and is generally referred to as Mr. Warlow's first letter. It was dated 16th October and was made available to the other place on the 18th. Mr. Warlow wrote a second letter, dated 18th November, to which I shall refer later. That is now known as Mr. Warlow's second letter. Both letters are now in the Library of this House.
Mr. Warlow's first letter included the following statements: first,
So in what the Government said earlier, as I quoted, they were not being exactly fair to Mr. Warlow. His first letter does not bear the interpretation they sought to put on it. Nowhere does he say that dismantling is impracticable--a nuisance perhaps; hitherto unusual because unnecessary; at worst, the loss of a 10p screw or a scratch on the polish. Everyone outside the Home Office knows that it is simply not true that this is an impracticable proposal, since, in the words of Mr. Warlow:
Faced with this overwhelming evidence, the Government conceded that dismantlement was practicable. At Committee stage in the other place, my right honourable friend the Home Secretary said:
About 95 per cent. of handguns can be easily dismantled. The vast majority of centre fire multi-shot pistols can be dismantled. Under this amendment, those guns which cannot be dismantled cannot be retained. But they are a tiny number compared with the many thousands that can be dismantled. I understand that all new models already meet the criterion of dismantlement; and if any manufacturers in future were tempted to market a gun which did not disassemble as required by law, they would not make many legal sales.
Faced with the collapse of their argument on practicality, the Government have retreated to new ground. They raised the non-existent spectre of illicit spares being kept at home. Thus my right honourable friend the Home Secretary said in the other place on 18th December:
It seems to be common ground that the number of illegal guns in this country exceeds the number of legal guns, perhaps greatly so. But that does not prevent the Government from maintaining a system of legal gun ownership. That, of course, is quite right.
There are any number of ways in which the new law, like the old, can be broken. A gun may, for example, be stolen from a club, taken away surreptitiously, bought illegally or stolen from some other source. The identical questions arise for a component part as arise for the whole gun. In fact, in so far as a part is a less attractive target for theft than a whole gun, the risk of illegality is less for the part than it is for the whole.
So the statement of my right honourable friend the Home Secretary was simply incorrect if he meant that it is somehow easier to break the law with a part than with a whole gun. It is not true because the legal control on the part is as strong as the control on the whole. A legal spare part cannot be obtained without police permission. Getting the system off to a secure start will rely on exactly the same information; that is, the current certificates, whether we are dealing with dismantled guns or whole guns. All components, as well as all whole guns, which do not conform to the Bill's requirements will have to be surrendered. Illegal components are more difficult to obtain than illegal guns and are probably more expensive. There is also the problem that an illegal spare part may not fit a gun even if it is of the same model.
Finally, it is very difficult to see why anyone willing and able to buy an illegal gun should bother to buy an illegal part.
Faced with those facts, the last refuge of the Government has been to quote a sentence from the second letter of Mr. Warlow, dated 18th November 1996. The obvious inadequacy of Mr. Warlow's first letter was exposed in the debate in the other place on 18th November. The Government had to describe it as:
On 18th November, the same day as the debate on the Floor of the other place, Mr. Warlow wrote his second letter to the Home Office. His letter was described by the Government as:
Against Mr. Warlow's opinions, there is a letter which I have also put in your Lordship's Library from a Mr. Colin Greenwood of the Firearms Research and Advisory Service. It is a comprehensive demolition job of both of Mr. Warlow's letters. As far as I can see, Mr. Greenwood is every bit as qualified as Mr. Warlow.
Be that as it may, in his second letter of 18th November Mr. Warlow said,
All Mr. Warlow's objections are met once it is recognised that at the commencement of the Act all pistols will be subject to assessment by the police. A complete inventory of pistols and component parts exists today on firearms certificates. All pistols not conforming to the Act will have to be surrendered and removed from the certificate. Exactly the same applies to component parts. Thereafter, all that is required is for the police to notify the club of any changes in a member's certificate.
There are at least seven other statements in Mr. Warlow's second letter which can easily be shown to be irrelevant or plainly wrong, but at this late hour I will not weary the Committee with them. I may, I suppose, be forced to debate them if my noble friend prays them in her aid when she comes to reply. I have to say that I hope she will not do so.
I very much hope that what I have said will convince the Committee that this amendment would produce a safer, cheaper, more reasonable solution than is proposed in the Bill. It would allow many thousands of
Page 3, line 18, at end insert ("or
(d) the slide assembly or cylinder has been removed and stored according to the conditions specified in subsection (2A) below.
(2A) Except as permitted by virtue of any provision of this Act, a small-calibre pistol shall be held under the following conditions--
(a) the slide assembly or cylinder shall be held on the premises of a licensed pistol club, and
(b) the remainder of the weapon shall be stored at different premises which shall be specified on the certificate granted for that pistol.").
"[The option] which is open to the least objection on the ground of practicability is the temporary dismantling of self-loading pistols and revolvers by the removal of major components".
"While removal of key components is feasible for certain types of gun, it is not a practical proposition for others",
At Second Reading in another place, my right honourable friend the Home Secretary said:
"The Government took advice from the Forensic Science Service on the practicability of disabling multi-shot handguns. It concluded that that way forward was unworkable".--[Official Report, Commons, 12/11/96; col. 175.]
"The majority of self-loading pistols are designed so as to allow them to be stripped down to their major components without the use of tools";
second,
"In the case of most self-loading pistols the slide can be removed relatively easily";
and, third,
"In the case of the most common design of revolver it would be a most unusual operation to remove the cylinder",
with the small risk that,
"the retaining screw in a sideplate could be easily lost".
Mr. Warlow wrote that the handicaps to disassembly were: first,
"With some fine tuned target weapons care is necessary to avoid damaging their accuracy";
second,
"Some people are better at dismantling and re-assembling than others";
third,
"The removal of the revolver cylinder can lead to the loss of the small screw or to a scratching of the polished sideplate if the right screwdriver is not used".
"self-loading pistols are designed so as to allow them to be stripped down without the need for tools".
16 Jan 1997 : Column 330
"we accept that there are many varieties of handgun that can readily be dismantled, but there are others for which it is a much more difficult operation".--[Official Report, Commons, 18/11/96; col. 784.]
"it would not be difficult for a gun owner to keep an illicit spare at home. That would enable him to reactivate the gun at any time. It is perfectly true that, in doing so, he would be breaking the law, but he would be unlikely to be discovered until it was too late".--[Col. 784.]
"a summary of careful consideration by the service. [But] That letter ... was not meant to be a definitive answer to every point raised".--[Official Report, Commons, Standing Committee E, 20/11/96; col. 7.]
"as much advice as we are able to release".
Again, that comes from the same standing committee as I have just quoted. I believe that we can therefore regard it as the Government's definitive evidence, unless my noble friend on the Front Bench has anything startlingly new to put before us this evening.
"This procedure, (i.e. dismantlement) would not provide a guaranteed measure of assurance against the possible misuse of a pistol by a determined and motivated individual".
That is the phrase quoted by my noble friend on the Front Bench at our Second Reading, but the letter provides no supporting evidence for it. My noble friend did not answer the point I put to her at Second Reading that a determined and motivated individual will find it far easier and cheaper to acquire a whole weapon illegally than a spare part. I would invite her to see if she can answer that point this evening.
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