Lead ammunition restrictions - government announcement

[Mike L]

The composition of the LAG group is on this link , it shows it from 2010 when it was set up and subsequently after the divisive report Membership of LAG – Lead Ammunition Group

No, the link to where John swift was rewarded by BASC with a life membership for joining the antis.?

 

[timbrayford]

No, the link to where John swift was rewarded by BASC with a life membership for joining the antis.?

I believe that the words I used were siding with the antis, best if you read the matter in its entirety as you are going off at a tangent.

 

[Mike L]

I believe that the words I used were siding with the antis, best if you read the matter in its entirety as you are going off at a tangent.

Crikey, like getting blood out of a stone, post the link to him being rewarded by BASC for SIDING with the antis then.

 

[timbrayford]

Crikey, like getting blood out of a stone, post the link to him being rewarded by BASC for SIDING with the antis then.

Read the links to enlighten yourself!

 

[Smellydog]

Talking of water. A friend's bore pipe water was always excellent until one year recently a underhanded night time operation to dump thousands of tons of top soil scooped up from a scrap yard site so planning could go ahead on said site resulted in elevated nickel, zinc and cadmium but not LEAD levels despite the zinc, (@Heym SR20 don't touch anything galved today like a railing or something similar, there is lead in It!) It required a much more sophisticated filter system from there on in.
The rogues avoided prosecution but were ordered to remove the waste. God knows where it went next!

Anyway, the point is that the land has been shot over for centuries with lead before but before the dodgy dumping there was no heavy metals in the water!
In other words, the shot lead wasn't an issue and also, wild birds are thriving on there too.
Is it hard to understand why I'm a cynic?

 

[timbrayford]

Crikey, like getting blood out of a stone, post the link to him being rewarded by BASC for SIDING with the antis then.

For the benefit of the illiterate what I actually said was:- The LAG split in essence along anti-pro shooting lines The Lead Ammunition Group - Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust , John Swift siding with the antis, and was rewarded with an honorary life membership of BASC."
i.e. No word "for" !!!!!!!

 

[Dunwaters]

So no reply to the points raised, not surprised actually.
The problem isn’t people pointing out the shortcomings of the campaign for the continued use of lead shot where environmental impact was negligible. Remember BASC policy was to oppose further restrictions and their campaign to do so was a failure. Part of this was due to their employees promoting the case for restriction when BASC’s own policy was to oppose it part was the acceptance that the call for restrictions had merit.

I would contend that you Sir are more of a problem by failing to hold BASC to account for their shortcomings and more than willing to accept restrictions for a quiet life.

I’m not a member of BASC, I don’t live in the UK. I am a member of NARGC and have been following the campaign to restrict lead use for 40 years.
You are indulging yourself in wishful thinking backed up by 20/20 hindsight.
Not once have you made a single proposal for future policy or action, you confine yourself to imaginary coulda shoulda woulda scenarios based on what has already occurred.
If you want to re-write history, join one of the local historical groups and re-enact the battle of Waterloo every Wednesday afternoon. Choose the French side, theres a good chance that you’ll win, of course it won’t change anything, but you’ll get to play “what if” with like minded folk for a few hours.
What shooting needs is to stop concentrating on the past, except for the purposes of learning from our mistakes, we need to be pro active and to do that we need representatives.
You are actively campaigning against the future of shooting.

 

[Ruger#1]

I’m not a member of BASC, I don’t live in the UK. I am a member of NARGC and have been following the campaign to restrict lead use for 40 years.
You are indulging yourself in wishful thinking backed up by 20/20 hindsight.
Not once have you made a single proposal for future policy or action, you confine yourself to imaginary coulda shoulda woulda scenarios based on what has already occurred.
If you want to re-write history, join one of the local historical groups and re-enact the battle of Waterloo every Wednesday afternoon. Choose the French side, theres a good chance that you’ll win, of course it won’t change anything, but you’ll get to play “what if” with like minded folk for a few hours.
What shooting needs is to stop concentrating on the past, except for the purposes of learning from our mistakes, we need to be pro active and to do that we need representatives.
You are actively campaigning against the future of shooting.

I find it hard to find relevance in any of your post to the points I have made or follow your rather bizarre recommendation to join a reenactment group and reenact the battle of Waterloo.
It seems your major concern is that we should not hold BASC to account for continually stressing its opposition to further restrictions on lead shot yet failing abysmally to achieve any results on that front.
It appears that they were incapable of even ensuring the continuation of lead shot in clay pigeon shooting on established shooting grounds despite it being carried out on comparatively small areas of ground mostly devoid of wildlife.

You seem to be more than happy with the outcome and quite willing to accept the level of defence that BASC was capable of. A precedent has been set that doesn’t bear well for shootings future. It seems that rather than fight if the odds seem too great due to general public ,media or UK government opinion ,as already stated ,BASC caves in and bizarrely accepts the posting of reams of information on social media designed to undermine opposition to further lead shot restrictions by its representatives.

What shooting needs is not apologists for failure and that’s the camp you currently occupy.

By not holding BASC to account for its catalogue of well documented failures, which started with failing to consult its own membership, and accepting its poor performance we leave ourselves open to a repetition when the next obstacle to shooting appears.

I’m not here to waste my time posting irrelevant tales of how I would organise opposition to further lead shot restrictions I’m making it clear that the campaign by BASC to oppose further lead shot restrictions was seriously flawed and questioning the justification of having a BASC representative post reams of emotive pro lead shot restrictions propaganda when the official policy of BASC was to oppose those lead shot restrictions. Rather than ramble on about woulda shoulda coulda why don’t you grasp the nettle and attempt to justify that last conflicting scenario.

 

[Chris Richardson]

Crikey, like getting blood out of a stone, post the link to him being rewarded by BASC for SIDING with the antis then.

I’m quite curious are you actually happy with bascs performance??

 

[Liveonce]

The current lead ban as proposed has to go through parliament so one hopes that we may yet have opportunity to influence the outcome after all they are starting to look good at doing u turns or watering down proposed legislation.

Which may be the work with MPs that BASC do will pay dividend, provide BASC actually want to see improvements, exemptions to the proposal other than .243 like lead shot for clay grounds.

 

[Conor O'Gorman]

Have any studies been done into steel shot ingestion either in wildfowl or birds?
Quite often wildfowl and geese deaths were caused by the gizzard being chocked solid with shot so it struggled to break down food or even get food into the gizzard rather than lead being absorbed into the bloodstream.
The same could quite easily happen with steel shot.

Perhaps the larger diameter shot may make it less likely to be ingested if not as similar to their preffered food.
Or it could make it worse if the larger steel shot is closer to their food source size.
Also being less dense it will probably be less likely to sink in soil or mud/silt so could actually be more available to wildlife.

Sorry but any wildlife gains on dry land are very marginal. And from wot ive seen the increased wounding esp in ducks was not good.

Jail55
Are ur guns fairly good shots??
My suspicion is steel can be comparable with good shots hitting the head.
The problem is with poorer shots winging and hitting them further back, u mibbee got away with it a bit more with lead.
Ive stopped going to pick up on that shoot since it swapped to steel

I know when i done my dissertation into lead shot 30 odd yr ago i seived Ts and Ts of stinking mud and silt 1 summer, never found a single pellet. Considering 1 pond off the ponds can shoot drives of 200 duck and 50+ on a flight and the rest werenae that far behind and guns were never the best shots.
Their should of been a lot of lead somewhere.
I even abondonded my random sampling to focus on the places u used to see it land when beating.
Still found bugger all.
And to really top it off my 2 control ponds that had never been shot had a higher lead concentration in the water than the shot ponds.
U couldnae make it up.


I'll be absolutely amazed if were not back in the exact same position in 10yrs time trying to defend steel shot, single use plastic cases or copper bullets.
Or even trying to justify using valuable minerals for shot that could be used far wiser in a world that raw materials are becoming ever more scarce and precious.

We have caved far far to easily.
Like we do with everything.
Its all very well saying only basc members can critise basc but the problem is wot ever they do or dont do comes back to haunt all shooters not just basc members

This is going full circle - back to raising concerns about steel shot that have been addressed multiple times on threads such as these, including comments on MRIs and broken teeth, responded to and not acknowledged, and now yet more comments opening up myriad more rabbit holes. Back to the OP there are some FAQs here:

Lead ammunition restrictions - your questions answered

Read our answers to questions about the planned lead ammunition legislation and what it means for shotgun, rifle and airgun shooters.

basc.org.uk

A detailed Defra briefing is here:

UK REACH restriction for lead in ammunition, 27 June 2025

Decision on a restriction proposal for lead in ammunition under UK REACH, including a draft amendment.

www.gov.uk

 

[Pine Marten]

It may be entertaining for you but in what way do you think this is a good thing ?

I hesitate to answer this because it seems so emotive to so man people. But I've been using mainly non-lead cartridges (steel and bismuth) since I started wildfowling in 2007, and the shoot syndicate I'm now in transitioned to exclusively non-lead four years ago. I haven't used lead for years now, and the same goes for my stalking rifles. In practical terms, it makes not one jot of difference to lethality. Steel shot tends to go right through birds or stop hard up against a bone, so in that sense it performs differently from lead. But certainly family and friends are happy to hear that none of the game I feed them contains lead. As am I for that matter. I don't really know whether there's a danger to human health from ingesting lead shot, but since I don't have to, why take the risk?

In terms of shotguns I did buy a new one 3 years ago, but before that I was using standard power steel in my old Brno side by side with no problems at all, and sometimes bismuth in my 16 bore. Bismuth is punishingly expensive but I look out for second hand cartridges or auction clearouts etc, and I don't use much anyway. Steel is a bit more expensive than lead but it's actually a pretty marginal cost in the overall picture.

Finally, it's not like this is a surprise to anyone. Fighting is a waste of time and energy. Did some of you fight the switch to unleaded petrol back in the day? It turned out fine in the end. It will be the same with this. No-one will remember what the fuss was about. As someone who has already fully transitioned, just embrace it, it's fine on the other side. Stuff changes, we adapt, that's how the world works.

 

[Dunwaters]

I find it hard to find relevance in any of your post to the points I have made or follow your rather bizarre recommendation to join a reenactment group and reenact the battle of Waterloo.
It seems your major concern is that we should not hold BASC to account for continually stressing its opposition to further restrictions on lead shot yet failing abysmally to achieve any results on that front.
It appears that they were incapable of even ensuring the continuation of lead shot in clay pigeon shooting on established shooting grounds despite it being carried out on comparatively small areas of ground mostly devoid of wildlife.

You seem to be more than happy with the outcome and quite willing to accept the level of defence that BASC was capable of. A precedent has been set that doesn’t bear well for shootings future. It seems that rather than fight if the odds seem too great due to general public ,media or UK government opinion ,as already stated ,BASC caves in and bizarrely accepts the posting of reams of information on social media designed to undermine opposition to further lead shot restrictions by its representatives.

What shooting needs is not apologists for failure and that’s the camp you currently occupy.

By not holding BASC to account for its catalogue of well documented failures, which started with failing to consult its own membership, and accepting its poor performance we leave ourselves open to a repetition when the next obstacle to shooting appears.

I’m not here to waste my time posting irrelevant tales of how I would organise opposition to further lead shot restrictions I’m making it clear that the campaign by BASC to oppose further lead shot restrictions was seriously flawed and questioning the justification of having a BASC representative post reams of emotive pro lead shot restrictions propaganda when the official policy of BASC was to oppose those lead shot restrictions. Rather than ramble on about woulda shoulda coulda why don’t you grasp the nettle and attempt to justify that last conflicting scenario.

I don’t have the patience for it, I’d just be wasting my time.

 

[Chris Richardson]

I hesitate to answer this because it seems so emotive to so man people. But I've been using mainly non-lead cartridges (steel and bismuth) since I started wildfowling in 2007, and the shoot syndicate I'm now in transitioned to exclusively non-lead four years ago. I haven't used lead for years now, and the same goes for my stalking rifles. In practical terms, it makes not one jot of difference to lethality. Steel shot tends to go right through birds or stop hard up against a bone, so in that sense it performs differently from lead. But certainly family and friends are happy to hear that none of the game I feed them contains lead. As am I for that matter. I don't really know whether there's a danger to human health from ingesting lead shot, but since I don't have to, why take the risk?

In terms of shotguns I did buy a new one 3 years ago, but before that I was using standard power steel in my old Brno side by side with no problems at all, and sometimes bismuth in my 16 bore. Bismuth is punishingly expensive but I look out for second hand cartridges or auction clearouts etc, and I don't use much anyway. Steel is a bit more expensive than lead but it's actually a pretty marginal cost in the overall picture.

Finally, it's not like this is a surprise to anyone. Fighting is a waste of time and energy. Did some of you fight the switch to unleaded petrol back in the day? It turned out fine in the end. It will be the same with this. No-one will remember what the fuss was about. As someone who has already fully transitioned, just embrace it, it's fine on the other side. Stuff changes, we adapt, that's how the world works.

Out of interest how much shooting are you doing ? I think the crux of the matter is what’s next ? If we don’t try and stand up for ourselves as a community then as said previously on this thread it’s death by a thousand cuts

 

[Ruger#1]

Which may be the work with MPs that BASC do will pay dividend, provide BASC actually want to see improvements, exemptions to the proposal other than .243 like lead shot for clay grounds.

An exemption for the use of lead shot on shooting grounds would be a good concession to fight for and enable the continued use of older shotguns ill suited for steel shot use.
Not having to eradicate the work of past generations of gunmakers by boring out the heavily choked pigeon guns of the past and enabling older Damascus barrelled guns and short chambered small bores to continue to have some use would be welcome.
All would have been made more likely if our organisations had fought harder on our behalf but perhaps some credibility can be regained going forward.
The idea that a small proportion of shooters would choose to misuse 7.5 shot or smaller on game I think is not sufficient justification to prevent this being accepted after all breaking the new laws would have penalties and the risk of environmental harm by transgressors would be negligible and large scale non compliance easily dealt with.
Bearing in mind that the use of older side by sides is very much a niche interest and as the generation of shooters most likely to enjoy using such guns age any perceived threat to the environment would diminish over time.
The refusal to entertain such proposals would show the proposed legislation as vindictive in nature and contrary to the reasoning that lead shot restrictions are sought solely to safeguard wildlife and the environment.

 

[Ruger#1]

I don’t have the patience for it, I’d just be wasting my time.

So no time to write even one relevant sentence in response to my last post, but time to post one irrelevant one.

 

[Liveonce]

An exemption for the use of lead shot on shooting grounds would be a good concession to fight for and enable the continued use of older shotguns ill suited for steel shot use.
Not having to eradicate the work of past generations of gunmakers by boring out the heavily choked pigeon guns of the past and enabling older Damascus barrelled guns and short chambered small bores to continue to have some use would be welcome.
All would have been made more likely if our organisations had fought harder on our behalf but perhaps some credibility can be regained going forward.
The idea that a small proportion of shooters would choose to misuse 7.5 shot or smaller on game I think is not sufficient justification to prevent this being accepted after all breaking the new laws would have penalties and the risk of environmental harm by transgressors would be negligible and large scale non compliance easily dealt with.
Bearing in mind that the use of older side by sides is very much a niche interest and as the generation of shooters most likely to enjoy using such guns age any perceived threat to the environment would diminish over time.
The refusal to entertain such proposals would show the proposed legislation as vindictive in nature and contrary to the reasoning that lead shot restrictions are sought solely to safeguard wildlife and the environment.

Said it before if it’s ok to label lead target rifle ammo as not for live quarry shooting why not small size shot for clay shooting shot over a very small area of land in comparison to live quarry shooting.

just because a very few continued illegally to use lead shot on ducks, is not a good reason to ban it for all just like speeding in car, we do not ban cars and I know which is worst for human health, road traffic accidents vs lead shot on a clay ground, no contest.

 

[Ruger#1]

This is going full circle - back to raising concerns about steel shot that have been addressed multiple times on threads such as these, including comments on MRIs and broken teeth, responded to and not acknowledged, and now yet more comments opening up myriad more rabbit holes. Back to the OP there are some FAQs here:

Lead ammunition restrictions - your questions answered

Read our answers to questions about the planned lead ammunition legislation and what it means for shotgun, rifle and airgun shooters.

basc.org.uk

A detailed Defra briefing is here:

UK REACH restriction for lead in ammunition, 27 June 2025

Decision on a restriction proposal for lead in ammunition under UK REACH, including a draft amendment.

www.gov.uk

So no response to criticism of the inconsistent campaign to defend the imposition of further restrictions , no acknowledgement of failure and no indication that in future BASC will consult its members on policy decisions or conceding that the interests of the shooting community come before the opinions of the general public , media or the uk government.
More worryingly no indication of any plans to seek any exemptions or concessions prior to the new laws being put into practice.
Voice of shooting ????

 

[jall55]

My thought is whether there is any evidence of harm to birds or other wildlife/animals caused by wads of whatever make? Danish research looks at prevalence of plastic wads in coastal habitats which is of concern but no actual evidence of harm unless I have missed it. I recall research by Eley decades ago that plastic wads did no harm to livestock if ingested but perhaps someone can put me right with more recent research on the environmental impact of wads? The volume of evidence is for negative impacts on birds from lead shot ingestion. As regards societal views on plastic it makes sense to move away from plastic wads and lead shot and it is interesting that there is no critique of the evidence on plastic wads to same extent as for lead shot. I think that is because wads are visible in the field and lead shot is not.

We surely cant be saying plastic does no harm Conor ?

 

[jall55]

Have any studies been done into steel shot ingestion either in wildfowl or birds?
Quite often wildfowl and geese deaths were caused by the gizzard being chocked solid with shot so it struggled to break down food or even get food into the gizzard rather than lead being absorbed into the bloodstream.
The same could quite easily happen with steel shot.

Perhaps the larger diameter shot may make it less likely to be ingested if not as similar to their preffered food.
Or it could make it worse if the larger steel shot is closer to their food source size.
Also being less dense it will probably be less likely to sink in soil or mud/silt so could actually be more available to wildlife.

Sorry but any wildlife gains on dry land are very marginal. And from wot ive seen the increased wounding esp in ducks was not good.

Jail55
Are ur guns fairly good shots??
My suspicion is steel can be comparable with good shots hitting the head.
The problem is with poorer shots winging and hitting them further back, u mibbee got away with it a bit more with lead.
Ive stopped going to pick up on that shoot since it swapped to steel

I know when i done my dissertation into lead shot 30 odd yr ago i seived Ts and Ts of stinking mud and silt 1 summer, never found a single pellet. Considering 1 pond off the ponds can shoot drives of 200 duck and 50+ on a flight and the rest werenae that far behind and guns were never the best shots.
Their should of been a lot of lead somewhere.
I even abondonded my random sampling to focus on the places u used to see it land when beating.
Still found bugger all.
And to really top it off my 2 control ponds that had never been shot had a higher lead concentration in the water than the shot ponds.
U couldnae make it up.


I'll be absolutely amazed if were not back in the exact same position in 10yrs time trying to defend steel shot, single use plastic cases or copper bullets.
Or even trying to justify using valuable minerals for shot that could be used far wiser in a world that raw materials are becoming ever more scarce and precious.

We have caved far far to easily.
Like we do with everything.
Its all very well saying only basc members can critise basc but the problem is wot ever they do or dont do comes back to haunt all shooters not just basc members

Hi mate
We are really very average shots tbh hahah
We have a massive range of men and women on our shoot from 15 years old to 85 years