JUST 55 guns were taken off the streets last year by Britain’s FBI.
The annual haul was the smallest in the National Crime Agency’s ten-year history.
Its annual report shows the combined total of firearms seized in the UK and overseas in 2022/23 was 133.
It states 78 seizures were abroad, leaving just 55 domestically.
This compares with a total of 685 guns — including 263 in the UK — grabbed in 2019/20.
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It means that in the space of three years the agency has gone from taking 22 firearms a month off Britain’s streets to barely one a week.
Gun crimes last year included the murders of nine-year-old Olivia Platt-Korbel and pubgoer Elle Edwards on Merseyside and a drive-by shooting on a family attending a funeral in Euston, central London.
The agency report states “firearms crime is currently lower than the long-term trend”, with 5,750 firearms offences in England and Wales in the year to March 2022.
But data published by the ONS two weeks ago shows firearm offences in England and Wales rose to 6,365 in 2022/23 — up 615 on 2021/22.
It means the NCA seized just one firearm in the UK for every 115 offences committed in 2022/23 — compared with one for every 24 offences in 2019/20.
The report gave no reason for the drop.
Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said: “There are serious questions for the Home Secretary about why there has been such a huge drop in firearms seizures at a time when organised crime activity is increasing and we’ve seen devastating murders involving guns.”
An NCA spokesperson said: “In leading and coordinating the national response, our activity is focused on the disruption of supply chains rather than volume seizures, increasing our impact on the availability of firearms.
“We continue to work closely with partners in the UK and internationally to share intelligence relating to the criminal firearms marketplace.
“This work directly enables operational activity, proactive targeting of organised crime groups, disruption of criminal supply chains in the UK and overseas and removal of firearms from criminal circulation.”
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