Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many illegal firearms were seized in each of the last five years; and how many of those were (a) pistols, (b) rifles, (c) shotguns and (d) machine guns.

The Home Office does not maintain records of firearms seized by police forces in England and Wales.The National Ballistics Intelligence Service regularly assesses the volume and type of illegal firearms in use in the UK. The information is operationally sensitive and is not suitable for release.