The argument, led by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), that
the cost of obtaining or renewing a shotgun certificate should rise
substantially is a piece of calculated opportunism. Police chiefs around the
country, challenged by cuts in funding, are desperate to find new sources of
revenue and it is pretty clear that they will have calculated that demanding
more cash from the shooting community will play well with the wider public,
many of whom wrongly view shooting as a pursuit for rich toffs.
Shooters
will have noted the mealy mouthed references being made in official
communiques suggesting that public safety might be under threat unless a big
rise in charges is pushed through. Needless to say there is no mention of
any plan to try and improve upon the abysmally low standard of service
shooters currently receive when paying to get their licences renewed. The
cuts are real enough of course, but those police authorities searching for a
way of making a buck or two appear to have overlooked a source of income
very close to home; one which they could easily access simply by asking
ACPO to hand over some or all of the millions it currently has in the bank.
For those who up to this point thought that ACPO was a public body open to
scrutiny and accountable to us all the advice is – think again. ACPO is a
not-for-profit private company; not for profit that is as far as its
non-existent shareholders are concerned but very profitable presumably for
its Chief Executive, Tom Flaherty and a host of other senior officers who
enjoy lucrative short term contracts. ACPO has lots of ways of making money.
It does it, for example, by selling information from the Police National
Computer which it accesses for 60p a throw and then flogs on to third
parties for as much as £70. This might explain the persistence of all those
ambulance chasing compensation specialists, who bombard accident victims –
legitimate and otherwise – with no-win no-fee deals. After all if you had
shelled out seventy quid for a name and address, you’d look for some return
too.
ACPO also does a nice line in marketing ‘police approval’ logos to
firms selling anti-theft devices; it runs a business offering training to
speed camera operators, which interestingly was once managed by a senior
officer who was at the time banned from driving (you couldn’t make it up).
Oh and it gets £30 million plus of our money for advising Government and
police forces. Which is odd, given that advising Government and police
forces was what we thought it had been set up to do in the first place.