GOVERNMENT IS USING TAXPAYERS’ MONEY TO SUBSIDISE GUN OWNERSHIP

THE revelation that the Government is losing money hand-over-fist bankrolling gun ownership is the starkest indication yet that Tory priorities are dreadfully misplaced.

Some £20m of taxpayers’ money is being frittered on gun licences every year.  This at a time when local authorities have been forced to cut spending so deeply that the very future of many public services is under serious threat.

It costs £50 to acquire a gun licence, which last for five years.   Yet the cost to the police of processing each application amounts to £200.  So for everyone who feels the need to own a gun, it takes three of us to chip in an equivalent amount in order to subsidise them.  How can that possibly be right?

What makes it worse is that the Home Office minister Damian Green made a pledge to resolve the issue by ensuring full cost recovery of the gun licence fee.  Yet after receiving approval from the Treasury and Regulatory Policy Committee, the Government’s new Reducing Regulation Committee decided to block the move.

Why would that possibly be?  Could it be anything to do with the green wellie brigade being Tory Party supporters? 

Later today George Osborne is due to tell the Tory Party faithful at the Conservative conference that he’s going to end the ‘something for nothing culture’.  But it seems this crackdown doesn’t apply to shooting fraternity.  Is it just possible that the same twisted logic that saw the Tories reduce support for the poor while cutting taxes for the rich was at play again in deciding to halt the policy change?

Whatever the reason, it shows that the Tory-led Government has no grasp of reality whatsoever.  The elderly and infirm and being expected to pay more for their care, the young and aspirant are being asked to pay more for their education, people in receipt of benefits are being forced to survive on less.

Yet gun owners don’t have to pay their own way, with the rest of us instead being burdened with picking up their bill.

It’s simply not right.

Why can’t gun owners cover the costs they create by simply putting more in to start with?  If they must have guns, then let’s put the licence fee up to at least £40 per year, making it self-funding.  Better still, increase it further so that it doesn’t just break even, but actually produces a small surplus to support public coffers so the gun-owning fraternity can gradually pay back some of the millions they have cost us already.

Of course, that’s far too logical for this Government.  In this case, it’s one rule for us and no rules at all for them.

We may never know how the Reducing Regulation Committee convinced itself it was doing right by dismissing the changes that would have meant full cost recovery of gun licences.  But what we do know is that it’s a decision that will continue to cost the rest of us, quite literally, until something is done about it.  That is why I have tabled a series of parliamentary questions to highlight this abuse and press the Government to change its stance.  Time will tell whether it will.