Moving House With a Collection
Two things go wrong when people move: the licensing department is told at the wrong point, and nobody works out where the guns are going until the van is outside. Both are avoidable, and the order of operations matters more than anything else on this page.
Your certificate is tied to an address. Moving is therefore not a domestic matter that you deal with afterwards, and the notification requirements sit on you rather than on your solicitor, your remover or us. What follows is the practical sequence.
On this page
Tell the licensing department, and when
Notifying a change of address is a condition of a certificate, and the notification is required in a defined way and within a defined period. Do not take the period from a page on the internet, including this one — read the conditions printed on your own certificate, because that is the document that binds you, and if anything is ambiguous telephone the licensing department and ask.
What we would add from experience: tell them earlier than you have to. A department that hears from you six weeks out has time to arrange a visit and to tell you what they will want to see. A department that hears from you the week you move is being asked to do you a favour.
The gap nobody plans for
Completion day is the problem. There is a period — sometimes hours, sometimes weeks if the chain is awkward or you are renting between houses — where the old storage is gone and the new storage does not exist. That period has to be planned rather than improvised, because the alternative is guns in a car or at a friend’s house, and neither is a decision to make at eight in the morning with a removal van waiting.
The usual answers are a registered firearms dealer holding them, or a family member or friend who holds an appropriate certificate and has storage the licensing department is content with. Whichever it is, agree it in advance and tell the licensing department what you are doing.
If the new house needs building work before storage can go in — and in an older house it very often does — assume the gap is months rather than days, and plan on that basis from the beginning.
Survey the new house before you exchange, if you can
The single most useful thing you can do is walk the new house with the storage question in your head, at viewing stage, before you are committed.
What we would look for: a wall that is actually structural rather than a stud partition; somewhere out of sight of a window and away from the front door; somewhere that is not the coldest external wall in the building; enough room to open a door fully and stand in front of it; and a route to get the cabinet into the room at all, which in a house with a tight staircase is a genuine constraint and one that decides whether a piece is built in one or in sections.
Take photographs of the wall, the room and the doorway. We can tell you a great deal from those before anybody measures anything.
Moving the guns themselves
Removers are not the answer. Guns travel with you, in cases, out of sight, and the vehicle is not left unattended with them in it. That is ordinary good practice rather than a rule we are inventing, and it is what a licensing department would expect to hear.
Take the opportunity while everything is out to photograph each gun and record serial numbers if you have not already — this is the one moment in a decade when they are all in front of you. That record is what an insurer wants and what the police need if anything goes missing. There is more on it in insurance, valuations and what underwriters want to see.
The cabinet you are leaving behind
A fitted cabinet usually stays, and it should be handed over emptied, unlocked and with a word to the buyer about what it is. Leaving a locked steel cabinet with no keys in a house is an unkindness and occasionally a security problem of its own.
Freestanding pieces can move, and ours are built with that in mind, but check the new house will take it before assuming — the wall that carried it in one house may not exist in the next, and a heavy piece that cannot be fixed is a piece that has to be rethought.
Once you are in
Confirm the new address is on the certificate. Expect a visit and welcome it. Update your insurer, in writing, with the new address and the new storage arrangement — a policy that describes a cabinet in a cellar you no longer own is a policy with a hole in it. And if there is a gap before permanent storage is built, tell both the licensing department and the insurer what the interim arrangement is.
Moving, or thinking about it
Talk to us at viewing stage rather than after completion. Lead times mean that a cabinet ordered on the day you move is a cabinet you get some months later, and the gap in between is the part that causes the trouble. Send photographs of the room and a note of what you own.
Written from a cabinetmaker’s experience of building storage into houses people have just moved into. It is not legal advice and it does not state the law or the notification periods. The conditions printed on your certificate are what bind you, and your local firearms licensing department is the authority on what they require and when.