The National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) has published the latest league table with performance data of the 43 police firearms licensing departments in England and Wales, representing the three months up to 30 June 2026. The picture presented is not a positive one and reinforces our campaign for the centralisation of firearms licensing into one body.
Jeremy Hinde, Secretary of the British Shooting Sports Council summarised the quarter-on-quarter data as showing:
“...a continuation, rather than reversal, of the trend identified in the Council’s Q3 2025/6 analysis: a firearms licensing system with a shrinking certificate-holder base [down 2.8%], a slowly eroding national Service Level Agreement (SLA) performance [1.59% down], and a rapidly growing reliance on temporary permits as a safety valve for delay [11.5% up].”
New in this quarter’s figures are separated statistics for grants and renewals, which has confirmed the Council’s concerns that the previously blended data masked materially different underlying data and allowed performance to appear better than the reality. Mr Hinde’s critique continued:
“The pattern is national and consistent: renewal applications are processed far faster against the SLA than new grants in almost every force. Avon & Somerset's blended 88.64% conceals a 7.59% grant rate sitting alongside a 97.49% renewal rate — an 89.9 percentage-point gap. Devon & Cornwall, Gloucestershire and North Yorkshire show similarly wide gaps. This is the clearest evidence yet that new-applicant waiting times are substantially worse than the blended national headlines suggest.”
Turning to the league table, forces have been split into a traffic light system according to consistent SLA / temporary-permit risk thresholds (GREEN: SLA ≥75% and temporary permits <20; AMBER: SLA 50–74% or permits 20–150; RED: SLA <50% and/or permits >150).
With such variation between the performance of forces in England and Wales, the writing is on the wall for the current system of autonomous Police Chiefs delivering firearms licensing services in their fiefdoms. Meanwhile the argument for centralisation continues to gather momentum.
The full statistics can be read here.