Here's the latest, from their London assembly member Caroline Pidgeon:
(cont. ad nauseam pg 94, at http://www.mayorwatch.co.uk/its-time-fo ... un-owners/)One small but important contribution to tackling the financial challenges facing the Met would be if the police force no longer had to subsidise gun owners.
It is now widely accepted that the fees charged for licensing firearms are nowhere near the level needed to cover costs to the police of operating a licensing system and making home security checks...
I felt moved to respond in the comments section:
That almost certainly won't get published - the guy who runs that website is quite the lefty himself and loves nothing more than bashing what he sees as his class enemies. But what the hell, countering the sort of nonsense peddled by Lib Dems is a vital public service.It’s really quite strange how Pidgeon only quotes the figure for income for grants of firearm certificates, not taking into account the significant income from renewals and variations. It’s bizarre, really, because she even notes that renewals cost £40 a time. And from the wording of her question to the Mayor, as well as the wording of the Labour person’s question, the figures that Pidgeon oh-so-happily quotes seem to cover firearm certificates alone. Anyone with more than a narrow vote-grabbing interest in this topic would know that firearm and shotgun certificates are two separate areas of the Firearms Enquiry Team’s work, both of which are accounted for separately.
Pidgeon’s example of fishing licences is, unfortunately for her, a highly flawed comparison. Anglers who pay the steep annual cost of a fishing licence are funding the upkeep of the rivers and other waterways they fish on. A fishing licence partly goes towards funding Firearm and shotgun certificate revenue, in contrast, is not used for the upkeep of rifle ranges, clay pigeon grounds or other shooting grounds such as grouse moors. It all goes straight back to the licensing authority. Full cost recovery does not operate in many areas of British public life, recognising that all taxpayers already contribute towards the cost of public services provided by the police. Unless, of course, Pidgeon wants all users of police services to start paying more. A robbery callout surcharge, perhaps?
One significant area of public life where agitators keep demanding the full cost recovery principle be brought to bear is in the issuing of driving licences. Since the backend systems used to record the issuing of driving licences were computerised, driving licence fees payable by applicants fell by a third: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/driv ... es-to-fall
I would have expected someone with a genuine interest in firearms licensing matters, as Pidgeon clearly wants readers to think she is, to throw her support behind the firearms licensing ecommerce project – which has the potential to cut fees to a similar degree as those for driving licences – instead of throwing around headline numbers which in themselves do not paint the full picture. The ecommerce project, headed by the police, aims to replace tens of thousands of manual paper files used by firearms licensing departments with a national computerised system, thereby increasing public safety, reducing public expenditure and eliminating waste and inefficiency.
The ecommerce system would help all UK police forces reduce their expenditure on firearms licensing to the levels enjoyed by South Wales Police, who are able to issue a certificate for £67 – and that figure is under the current arrangements, suggesting that the Met have a large number of inefficiencies in their processes: http://www.south-wales.police.uk/wp-con ... 123_13.pdf
Perhaps Pidgeon would care to talk to the shooting community – who are tax paying voters, of course – before firing at them from the hip. Staying in touch with voters and constituents would help her avoid shooting herself in the foot again.
