Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood MP has announced a raft of planned reforms to overhaul the disparate map of police forces in England and Wales, which she describes as “no longer designed to meet the scale, pace, and complexity of today’s challenges”.
Many of the lines that the Home Secretary uses in her introduction to her proposals are strikingly similar to those used in a report commissioned by the Countryside Alliance looking into the faltering police firearms licensing departments in England and Wales. Those who have read both would be hard pushed to determine from which document comes the line “Structural reform of our existing forces is long overdue. The 43-force model, nearly unchanged in 60 years, is no longer fit for purpose” – the answer: the Home Secretary’s.
The key proposal made by the government is to “establish a National Police Service. In time, this will handle all national policing responsibilities […] the new force will lift the burden of delivering national responsibilities from local forces, ensuring that their focus is entirely on policing their streets.”
The Countryside Alliance will be engaging with the Home Secretary and her team to ensure that firearms licensing departments are included in her proposed review of police force structures and “the current fragmented landscapes of partnerships and bodies”.
Shooting legislation is coming under threat through the imminent consultation on the unnecessary and unjustified alignment of legislation for Section 2 shotguns with Section 1 firearms. If the government’s desired outcome is reduction of risk to public safety, then alignment would not achieve it, but reform of the inconsistent application of legislation by bringing the 43 firearms licensing departments together, however, would. His Majesty’s Inspectorate is currently conducting reviews of several police firearms licensing departments and the first of its published reports labels the Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire area as “accelerated cause for concern” – action is needed now.
The Home Secretary and the shooting community alike have a golden opportunity to sort out the inconsistent and inefficient firearms licensing structures through these police reforms. She states that “for too long, force performance has been allowed to vary across the country” and that what is needed is “Fewer regional police forces that can deliver consistent specialist functions”. Our answer to that is that few functions vary more widely than firearms licensing, and that to sort out the problems a single, centralised firearms licensing body needs to be created. If a National Police Service is to be created, it could be the opportunity to realise this necessary change.
The White Paper containing the Home Secretary’s proposals can be read in full here.