Violent Crime Reduction Bill

moved Amendment No. 120:"Page 29, line 38, at end insert—" ““(   )   This section shall not apply to a transfer that takes place in accordance with rules made by the Secretary of State specifying measures to be taken prior to any transfer that is not face-to-face.”” The noble Earl said: This is slightly related to the previous amendment but, from my point of view and with the knowledge that I have been given by the Gun Trade Association and the British Shooting Sports Council—I declared an interest on this the other day—this issue is very important to me. The proposed ban on sales other than those that are face-to-face is disproportionate to the problem that has been identified and it will be particularly irksome in rural areas. There is no evidence to suggest that sales by mail order pose a particular threat, and I invite the Government to delete this clause in its entirety. If the clause is to remain, provision should be made for an exemption where acceptable checks on the identity of the purchaser are available and are employed. Such systems already exist but may well need to be refined. If a rule-making power were created, acceptable systems could be devised by the trade in conjunction with the police and the Home Office. Rules could then be made to allow such a system to displace the requirement for face-to-face sales. I believe that such a system would be more proportionate to the problem. In commending the amendment to the Committee, I mention that, again, this clause was introduced in Committee in the other place with no prior consultation and was little discussed at that stage before being accepted into the draft Bill. Senior officials in the Gun Trade Association were expecting to meet Miss Blears on 9 May to put forward their arguments on airgun matters, but the Cabinet reshuffle put paid to that meeting. The GTA was hoping for some progress before the Committee stage in your Lordships’ House, but that has not been possible. Clause 27 will make it an offence to transfer airguns by mail order or the internet. All transfers by way of trade or business will have to be face-to-face. There is to be no licensing of airguns per se, and therefore there will be no audit trail. The sale over the counter requires the seller merely to establish the age, which will be 18, of the prospective purchaser and an address. The seller has two problems with this type of sale. If the purchaser looks okay, the seller will properly sell without an in-depth check as to his bona fides. The second problem is that, face-to-face, he may be tempted to consider the commercial question—for example, if he pushes too hard in his desire to extract information from the purchaser, he may well lose the sale. None of that happens with a mail-order sale. With a mail-order sale, the prospective purchaser contacts the seller, who asks him for a credit card number and a billing address. Very few credit cards are available in the UK to under-18 year-olds. The seller then confirms these details through the use of the electoral roll on the internet, freely available at minimum cost. Incidentally, I do not know how something can be freely available at minimum cost—that sounds rather odd. If the checks prove valid, the seller dispatches the airgun to the address on the electoral roll. That is a copper-bottomed method of checking bona fides which has been in use by the industry for a very long while and could easily be written into rules. Needless to say, the airgun industry relies very heavily on mail-order and internet sales, and taking away this aspect of it will seriously, and totally unnecessarily, hamper the trade. There is no evidence to suggest that mail-order sales in the past have caused crimes to be committed by those who purchase using this method. I beg to move.