No public subsidy of shotgun licences

Every year campaigners, police forces and Police and Crime Commissioners (PCC) say that licences are too cheap and are being subsidised by taxpayers.

• In November 2013 Gill Marshall-Andrews Chair of the Gun Control Network wrote “At present, shooters pay £50 for a gun licence which lasts for 5 years. This has been the same since 2001. For the price of 4 cups of coffee a year a man can own as many shotguns as he likes.” 
• In 2015 Barry Coppinger, until 2020 the Cleveland PCC said that the Government should look at increasing the cost of licencing firearms and shotguns and complained that his force was effectively subsidising their cost.
• In 2016 Ann Barnes, then Kent PCC, said that taxpayers in Kent were subsidising gun owners by £338,556 a year. “What I take issue with is Kent Police money – taxpayers’ money – being used to subsidise someone’s hobby. No-one subsidises a gym membership, a fishing licence or a season ticket to watch the Gills [Gillingham FC]”.
• In 2018 West Midlands Police was shown to be losing an average of £36.85 per application -.nearly £100,000 a year! The same research estimated the loss to police forces across the country would be over £6.4 million.

• In August 2021, Plymouth resident Jake Davison shot and killed five people and injured two others before shooting himself. Six months later an information request revealed that Devon and Cornwall Police was spending around £630,000 each year processing firearm applications – but Davison was still allowed to own guns.
• In October 2021 West Midlands PCC Simon Foster said that his force was left with a £170,000 loss from processing firearms licences and certificates and was “effectively subsidising gun ownership”.
  

Despite this in October 2021 shooting lobby group BASC guided its members on how to respond to question in a survey by the Association of Police and Crime Commissioner’s (APCC) on firearms licensing in England and Wales.

The APPC asked: “As a member of the public, do you think that all of the costs incurred by the police and by medical practitioners in processing a firearms licence or shotgun certificate should be met by the applicant?”

The BASC guidance: “No. Firearms licensing is a service to the wider public to ensure public safety. This is not subsidising certificate holders, rather it is the public investing in a process which contributes to their wider protection from harm.” 

Rather than raise the cost of a licence so that the gun owner pays the full cost, the government is proposing to play with the statistics instead – by changing how long the licence lasts from five to ten years!

One police check, and that’s it for a decade!

How does that contribute to BASC’s bizarre assertion of the ‘wider protection from harm’?

Energy, rent, food. The cost everything is going up two-, three-, five-fold, but the cost of a firearm licence in 2022 is £88 – an increase of just 43% in over two decades.

 A shotgun licence costs even less – just £79.50!

 Want both a firearm licence AND a shotgun licence? A coterminous certificate as it is called will cost you just £90.

The shooting industry causes untold harm to millions of animals, is underpinned by wildlife crime, and is damaging to the environment – it is an insult to make us support it financially as well!