Quick Answer
His Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services (HMICFRS) published a report on 28 August 2026 concluding that firearms licensing in England and Wales "is not fit for purpose." Its headline recommendation is a single national firearms licensing authority to replace the 38 separate police firearms and explosives licensing units (FELUs). Nothing changes for existing certificate holders today. Any reform needs new legislation, and shooting organisations, including the Countryside Alliance, BASC and the British Shooting Sports Council (BSSC), broadly support the single-authority idea while pushing back hard on several of the report's other 22 recommendations.
What HMICFRS found, and why the "postcode lottery" matters
HMICFRS last raised concerns about firearms licensing over a decade ago, in its 2015 report "Targeting the Risk." This new inspection found many of the same problems still exist today.
The inspectorate identified an outdated legal framework spread across more than 30 pieces of legislation, guidance that is fragmented and open to interpretation, inconsistent training for licensing staff, and suitability checks that vary significantly between FELUs, and sometimes within the same unit.
In practice, this means two certificate holders with identical circumstances could face very different experiences depending on which force covers their area. Some FELUs contact both referees at every renewal, as required. Others admit they do not, citing staffing pressure. Home visit practice varies too. One certificate holder told inspectors they had not received a home visit in 24 years.
His Majesty's Inspector of Constabulary Lee Freeman summed it up: "They, and the wider public, deserve a system that is clear, consistent and robust. We found the current system is none of these things."
The good news: a single national authority
The headline recommendation, and the one drawing the widest support across the shooting community, is the creation of a new national firearms licensing authority. This would replace the 38 FELUs with a single body responsible for applications, renewals and ongoing monitoring, combining locally based staff for suitability visits with central control over decision-making, training and performance.
For certificate holders, this is genuinely encouraging. A single authority means one set of standards, one level of service, and an end to the postcode lottery that currently sees processing times and scrutiny vary wildly from force to force. The Countryside Alliance has campaigned for exactly this reform for years, and both BASC and BSSC have welcomed it too.
Bill Harriman, BASC's director of firearms, put it plainly: "BASC welcomes any initiative to remove the firearms licensing function from the hands of the police and give it a unitary agency." The reported timeline points to 1 September 2029, though the Home Office has not formally committed to a date.
Where the industry is pushing back, and why
Alongside the national authority proposal, HMICFRS made 22 further recommendations. Several of these have drawn sharp criticism from the organisations that represent Britain's shooting community, and for good reason.
Tim Bonner, chief executive of the Countryside Alliance, described the report as "riddled with contradictions." His organisation has flagged at least five recommendations it considers unworkable, including a full legislative overhaul via a new parliamentary bill, a mandatory competency test for all new applicants, aligning shotgun licensing with the stricter Section 1 rifle regime, in-person medical assessments at every single renewal, and tighter restrictions on visitor permits.
BASC has taken a similarly targeted position, welcoming the national authority while "firmly" rejecting the proposal to align Section 2 shotgun certificates with Section 1 firearms. This is not a new fight. In February 2026, not a single MP spoke in favour of merging shotgun and firearms licensing during a Commons debate that BASC had briefed extensively in advance.
The core objection is a practical one. Many FELUs already have significant backlogs, and some have stopped accepting new applications altogether. Layering mandatory competency tests, universal in-person medicals and a wholesale licensing merger onto a system that is already struggling risks making the backlog worse, not better, without clear evidence that any of it would improve public safety. As Bonner put it: "If these proposals were implemented they would cause carnage in the licensing system and do untold damage to the shooting sector, which is a crucial part of the rural economy."
The bigger picture: shooting sports and the countryside
It is worth stepping back from the headlines. Nearly 500,000 people in England and Wales hold a firearm or shotgun certificate, and the overwhelming majority use their guns responsibly, whether for target shooting, pest control, deer stalking or clay disciplines. Legally held firearms are involved in a statistically tiny proportion of gun crime in the UK.
Shooting sports also do real, measurable good for the countryside. Game shooting and pest control support habitat and wildlife management on a scale most people never see. The rural economy relies on shooting-related spending, from gunsmiths and cartridge suppliers to shooting grounds and rural hospitality. None of that changes because a watchdog has, quite reasonably, pointed out that the administrative machinery behind licensing needs fixing.
That is precisely the distinction the industry bodies are drawing. As BSSC put it, failures in administration "should not be confused with evidence that firearms law itself is fundamentally flawed." Fixing a broken licensing bureaucracy is a good thing for everyone. Rewriting firearms law on the back of that same report, without separate evidence, is a different question entirely.
A familiar pattern: echoes of 2015
None of this is entirely new. HMIC's 2015 report made near-identical criticisms of fragmented, inconsistent guidance and recommended that the Home Office distil its rules into something with "the weight of the law." That recommendation was never fully implemented.
Around the same time, the Law Commission ran its own scoping consultation into firearms law, ultimately publishing its final report in December 2015. It found the law scattered across 34 different Acts of Parliament, riddled with undefined terms, and vulnerable to loopholes such as the lack of an approved deactivation standard. Many of those recommendations were eventually implemented through the Policing and Crime Act 2017 and the Antique Firearms Regulations 2021, but it took years.
The lesson for certificate holders is that meaningful reform in this space moves slowly, and often only after repeated warnings from inspectors. This latest report is unlikely to be different. Expect debate, lobbying and probably years of parliamentary process before anything actually changes on the ground.
What this means for certificate holders right now
Nothing changes today. Any new national authority, competency test, or change to shotgun licensing would require primary legislation and a bill in Parliament. The Home Office has acknowledged the report and said some recommendations "reflect work already underway," but has not committed to a timetable or confirmed which recommendations it will accept.
For now, the sensible approach for certificate holders is the same as always: keep your records straight, respond promptly to any FELU contact, and stay engaged with the organisations representing your interests. Vectis Shooting Log exists precisely to make that record-keeping easier, whatever the licensing system looks like in five years' time.
We will keep watching this story and update readers as the Home Office responds and as further industry statements emerge.