Meeting of the Parliament 25 June 2015
In opening the debate for the Scottish Conservatives, I am sorry to say that I find myself every bit as perplexed about the bill now as I was at stage 1. The vast majority of it is greatly to be welcomed, in particular the provisions on alcohol licensing, metal dealers and public and sexual entertainment venues. In general, although the jury is perhaps still out on some of the provisions relating to the licensing of taxis and private hire cars, parts 2 and 3 of the bill are broadly to be welcomed. In particular, I welcome from a constituency point of view the rescinding of the five-year ban in the event of renewal of a personal licence when that licence has run out, as that is a commonsense and practical measure. The tightening up of existing licensing provisions is largely sensible, and those elements would, if they had been considered on their own, have undoubtedly attracted the unanimous support of members in the chamber.
However, the problem that we on the Conservative side of the chamber have—which will come as no surprise to members—is with part 1. It contains the new licensing provisions—they do not, please note, tighten up existing provisions—that relate to the new air weapons regime that the Government wishes to introduce. For us, that is a red-line issue that also involves an important point of democratic principle. We believe that part 1 should always have been a separate piece of legislation.
During the stage 1 debate, Kevin Stewart intervened on me to ask what might be different in a separate bill that would lead me to support it. The answer to that is quite possibly nothing, but the point is that we could have had a clear debate and decision-making process on a completely new area of licensing provision while almost certainly unanimously agreeing on a separate bill that covered the provisions in parts 2 and 3 of this bill. We on the Conservative side of the chamber are forced into the position of being unable to support the bill despite agreeing very much with a large part of it.
I will spend the brief time that is available to me explaining why we are so opposed to part 1. At stage 1, I raised a concern about the fact that the most recent statistics on air weapon offences, which should have been published in November 2014, would not be published until October this year—almost a year late. Lo and behold, the statistics have now been published, and they show that air weapon offences are at their second lowest level in the past decade. Such offences make up 0.06 per cent of all reported crime in Scotland, which is a drop of 73 per cent from their peak.
Against that background, the possessors of the estimated 500,000 airguns in Scotland are to undergo a process to license them to possess airguns. That process is to be carried out by officers of Police Scotland, but not by the trained civilian specialist firearms officers, whose numbers are being reduced from 34 to 14 as we speak. Instead, it will be carried out by rank-and-file police officers with no previous experience of weaponry at all, whose training—I am reliably informed—consists largely of learning about the legislation involved, rather than any hands-on weaponry training that might help officers to prepare for the task that they will have to undertake.
I am equally reliably informed that Police Scotland has a current backlog of more than 500 shotgun and firearms licence applications, so one can only begin to imagine what additional pressures the airgun licensing regime will place on it. Once a licence or permit has been gained, it will not be required to purchase the ammunition for those weapons. That could mean that those holders of airguns who do not bother or want to get a licence or permit—everybody agrees that there will be many of them—will have no difficulty in obtaining ammunition for their weapons. I suggest that those who are most likely to carry out airgun crimes are probably those least likely to bother to get a permit, especially one that costs around £80. I do not believe or accept that this new regime will have any impact on crime statistics whatsoever.
I suggested earlier that amendments 1 and 2 would reduce bureaucracy, expense and the unnecessary use of human resources. Had they been accepted, I am sure they would have had that effect, but they were not. We are left with a bill that will create a whole new layer of bureaucracy and expense. It will take up countless hours of police officers’ time to introduce a licensing regime that will do nothing to reduce the minute amount of crime that a minuscule number of airgun owners or possessors currently commit.
As I said earlier, the bill seems a perfect example of using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. That the sledgehammer is being wielded by a Scottish Government that preaches the gospel of cutting down on unnecessary red tape, expense and time wasting at every possible opportunity almost defies belief. We do not believe that this sledgehammer will crack the targeted nut; all it will do is place an unnecessary increased burden on thousands of perfectly law-abiding citizens, which is not something that Conservative members can support.
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