New delay to gun register

Data quality problems halt latest police pilots of firearms database

Technical problems have once again delayed the national firearms register, nine years after it was first proposed (Computing, 27 July).

The National Firearms Licensing Management System (NFLMS) is intended to provide a searchable, national register of all firearms certificate holders.

But trials of the troubled system were suspended at the end of last year when they encountered data quality problems.

Now the Police IT Organisation (Pito) hopes to start installing the system at police forces in England and Wales from April, but says there is no firm target for completion of the project.

‘During the pilot there were a number of data quality issues, which meant the system was returning errors, so the system was declined,’ a Pito spokeswoman told Computing.

‘By April, it is hoped that another pilot will have taken place and that the system will have been signed off for full implementation,’ she said.

The register, which has been developed by supplier Anite, was recommended after the Dunblane tragedy in 1996, and was passed into law in the 1997 Firearms (Amendment) Act.

The system has been plagued by problems relating to certificate printing and bandwidth, for example, and deployment has been delayed on numerous occasions (Computing, 24 October 2004).

Rick Naylor, president of the Police Superintendents’ Association of England and Wales, says the delay creates problems for police forces.

‘It’s disappointing that after something as horrendous as Dunblane, and the recommendation from that inquiry, that we are still here in 2006 waiting for the delivery of that recommendation,’ said Naylor.

There will be a debate on the problems with the NFLMS in the House of Lords today (Thursday), initiated by Lord Marlesford.

‘It is astonishing that in January 2006 police forces nationally still have no way of accessing in real time details of those who hold, or who did hold, or who have been refused licences to possess firearms, or of identifying such firearms,’ said Marlesford, who blames Home Office reticence for the prolonged delays to the register.

‘If the Home Office really is incapable, over a period of eight years, of computerising something as straightforward as a few hundred thousand firearms records, then it does suggest that they do not have a hope of making a success of the introduction of the national identity card scheme,’ he said.