Chief Inspector takes licensing overhaul call to Home Secretary

His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary, Michelle Skeer, has used her annual assessment of policing, published on 8 September, to tell the Home Secretary that the firearms licensing system in England and Wales “isn’t fit for purpose” and that “change is overdue”. The 56-page State of Policing report is her statutory report under section 54(4) of the Police Act 1996, and it carries the findings of the inspectorate’s thematic licensing inspection of 28 August into the formal record of the policing year.

What does the annual assessment say about firearms licensing?

The report gives licensing its own section, headed “The legal framework and governance arrangements for firearms licensing need a complete overhaul”. It opens by acknowledging the people the system serves: “Firearms licensing affects hundreds of thousands of people and has a critical role in protecting the public. Most certificate holders comply with the law and use firearms responsibly.”

For everyone’s safety, the report says, the system “should be clear, consistent and robust”. The inspectorate’s 2026 thematic inspection “found that the system was none of those things”.

Two failures are singled out. Policing “hadn’t adequately addressed” the recommendations the inspectorate made in its 2015 inspection of licensing, and the legislation itself “needed major changes”. The original Acts were “developed in a very different social and policing environment”, and successive amendments have made the legal framework “increasingly complex over time”, so that “forces across England and Wales interpret and apply the law differently”.

The statutory guidance the Government introduced in 2025 has led to “some improvements”, the report says, “but the guidance isn’t clear enough”, producing “different interpretations and variation instead of firm and enforceable rules”. The inspectorate repeats its recommendation that “clear, legally enforceable rules for firearms licensing should be introduced”.

A national authority, restated to the Home Secretary

The assessment restates the 23 recommendations of the August report and its central structural change: “Because of the scale of the problems we found, we recommended that the government removed responsibility for firearms licensing from chief constables and placed it with a new national firearms licensing authority for England and Wales.”

It also records that, for the first time in a thematic inspection, the inspectorate issued an accelerated cause of concern, over “serious concerns with aspects of a collaboration between three forces on firearms and explosives licensing”. That is the tripartite licensing arrangement between Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire, served in January. The chief constables accepted the findings in full, and the inspectorate says it will revisit the forces to check progress against its recommendations.

Policing minister Sarah Jones told Parliament on 9 September that shotgun certificate delays across the three counties were a matter for the three chief constables and the action plan they produced after the notice, and that the Government expected the plan to bring continued improvements.

How has the shooting sector responded to the inspectorate?

The sector’s position was set when the thematic report landed on 28 August. The British Association for Shooting and Conservation (BASC) welcomed the call for a single licensing authority, an aim it has pursued since 1992, while rejecting the accompanying recommendation to bring Section 2 shotgun certificates into line with Section 1 firearms.

Bill Harriman, BASC’s director of firearms, said at the time that the report “should settle any remaining argument about the direction of travel of firearms licensing in England and Wales”, but warned that a new authority “will take years to deliver and will only succeed if the new authority is properly resourced and staffed with well-trained, specialist personnel from day one”.

The National Gamekeepers’ Organisation, which gave evidence to the inspection, said the report carried through would be “the biggest shakeup of firearms legislation and licensing since 1968”.

The annual assessment does not revisit the Section 2 question; its licensing section is about the legal framework, the guidance and the governance of the system.

What happens next

The report is the Chief Inspector’s formal assessment for the year, which puts the “not fit for purpose” finding on the record the Home Secretary must answer. The Home Office has so far said only that it will consult “in due course” on the shotgun recommendation, in a written answer of 8 September, and has given no timetable for a response to the wider package of 23 recommendations.

Two things are already moving. Palantir Technologies was selected in June as the supplier to replace the National Firearms Licensing Management System, the database behind every certificate in England and Wales. And the inspectorate has committed to revisiting Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire against its accelerated cause of concern. Certificate holders and applicants should watch for the Government’s formal response to the recommendations, and for any consultation on a national licensing authority.

The full report, State of Policing: The Annual Assessment of Policing in England and Wales 2025–26, can be read on the HMICFRS website.