Public consultation on the Arms Act rewrite

Closes 28 Feb 2025

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Theme 5: Compliance, offences, and penalties

This section seeks your views on offences and penalties in the Act and their effectiveness in encouraging compliance.

The offences and penalties in the Act are out of date, complex, and inconsistent. Some of the penalties are not proportionate to the offence.

A clear and consistent compliance, monitoring and offences regime will encourage compliance with the Act and provide appropriate consequences for non-compliance. Offences seek to mitigate the risk and potential for harm, both to individuals and the wider community. The overall objective is to reduce the likelihood of firearms getting into the wrong hands and being misused and as a result increase public safety.

Offences and penalties

The Police and the Firearms Safety Authority (FSA) are responsible for compliance and enforcement of the Act to keep our communities safe.

Frontline Police officers are responsible for addressing illegal firearms use and enforcement. The rules about what is an offence is set out in the Act and, for more serious offences, in the Crimes Act 1961.

The Act contains three broad means to encourage compliance: 

  • improvement notices (which are notices issued by FSA to licence holders, or dealers, who fail to comply with provisions of the Act or conditions)
  • the revocation of a licence by FSA 
  • criminal prosecutions (Police). 

Complexity of regime

There is no overarching framework in the Act that sets a standard for offences and penalties for harmful behaviours. The offences are scattered throughout the Act and have inconsistent penalties. There are also several firearms offences that address the same, or substantially similar behaviours within the Act, as well as in the Crimes Act 1961, often with different penalties. 

The frequency and speed of changes in technology and patterns of offending and the slow nature of amending legislation can mean that it can take time for legislation to catch up with these changes.  

An overview of offences and penalties can be found in Appendix 7 of the Arms Act rewrite discussion document.