Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown

I am very grateful for the support from my fellow Committee member. She is dead right: it is a sensible idea that the Minister and the Government should seriously consider. This complex process, with a very large number of shotgun and firearms certificates, could be made considerably more efficient—the best forces do this already—by proper IT. The problem is that the best forces have the IT and do it really efficiently, but the worst are really not geared up properly with that IT. That is why, in the discussion about fee increases, we wanted to make sure that they were based on the best performance and not the worst. In our recent PAC hearing on police productivity, as the hon. Member for Tiverton and Minehead (Rachel Gilmour) knows—our report is out shortly—we found that a lot of forces, particularly the smaller forces, could not afford to upgrade their IT properly. That is a really serious issue, because as our Committee has found, if police forces do not have properly upgraded IT, that not only makes processes such as shotgun certificate licensing more expensive, because it is more inefficient and they have to do it manually, but makes the police force more liable to cyber-attacks. It cannot operate the proper AI learning systems and so on if there are not the proper systems to operate them on. All in all, this is a really sensible proposal. We know that the number of homicides by licensed shotguns and firearms is very low in this country. Nevertheless, every death and every wounded person is one too many and is a tragedy for that person and their family. It is incumbent on the Government to take this proposal seriously. I congratulate the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell again on bringing it before the House.