Violent Crime Reduction Bill

: There is a great deal in the Bill to be commended, not least the provisions regarding real firearms and realistic imitation firearms. As the Minister and other Members who served on the Committee know, however, our primary concern is airgun crime, although attempts to tackle real gun crime remain vital, as I said in Committee and I am happy to put on record again. I shall explain our concerns about airgun crime. In 2003–04, there were 68 firearms murders, 1,195 attempted murders, and more than 10,000 crimes involving real firearms in England. In Scotland over the same period, there was one murder, four attempted murders and fewer than 200 crimes in which the firearm was identified as a real one. The figures for handguns are even more stark. There were 5,123 crimes, including 35 murders, in England, compared with only 29 handgun crimes and no murders in Scotland. The Government are absolutely right to tackle this scourge and to clamp down on it as hard as they possibly can. I do not want to see the handgun crime that causes so much misery in parts of the south-east of England spreading to Scotland and other parts of the UK. In Scotland over that same period, however, there were 415 airgun crimes, compared with 194 crimes involving a real firearm—more than 200 per cent. more. I welcome the amendments that have been made to the Bill. The Minister knows that I have concerns about the licensing scheme relating to vendors rather than purchasers. I am being deliberately brief, but I hope that, if the Minister looks at the statistics in a year or two and finds that the measure has not been sufficiently robust, and if airgun crime continues to rise, the Government will revisit this issue and look more sympathetically at a purchaser licensing scheme, rather than a vendor licensing scheme.