UK police set to pilot register
Pito defends troubled firearms licensing project
Emma Nash, Computing 27 Jul 2005
By the end of next year police forces across England and Wales should be using
the National Firearms Licensing Management System (NFLMS).
The web-based system, developed by supplier Anite, will link to an Oracle
database. It is intended to fulfil requirements passed in the 1997 Firearms
(Amendment) Act to provide a searchable, national register of all firearm
certificate holders.
The Police IT Organisation (Pito), which is responsible for the project, says
technical issues identified in initial pilots last summer have now been
corrected, and that it will begin live tests with the Lancashire and
Metropolitan police forces in the autumn (Computing, 21 July).
The initial pilots identified problems with printing certificates and inadequate
bandwidth, which Pito says were a result of the rapid pace of technology change.
'When you scope a project like this in terms of user and bandwidth requirements,
it freezes time,' said Selvin Baker, NFLMS project manager at Pito. 'But in the
real world, police forces have moved on and are using some of that bandwidth.'
The problem is prompting Pito to review the way police forces across England and
Wales use bandwidth.
The NFLMS will be accessed by forces over the Criminal Justice Extranet (CJX).
This bandwidth is provided through an agreement between Pito and Cable &
Wireless, and forces purchase capacity as required. Pito is considering
delivering this bandwidth centrally.
'The contract is coming up for negotiation,' said Tom McArthur, director of
operational services at Pito. 'We are talking to IT directors to see if we can
do this better. This would remove a lot of the grief and go a long way to
enforcing some standards.'
McArthur says being able to deliver more bandwidth to forces as new applications
are delivered will be essential in the coming months and years, particularly as
Impact progresses - a programme set up to create a national intelligence system
for UK police (Computing, 9 February).
It is envisaged that NFLMS will be used to fulfil the firearms criteria of
Impact.
'How Impact will integrate with the NFLMS, which will already exist, is not
completely clear yet. But we do know there is an intention that NFLMS will be
integrated as part of Impact,' said Baker.
But Simon Dicketts, central administrator of NFLMS, says the register will prove
useful in tracing the history of illegal weapons.
'Unless it is homemade, a gun did not start life as illegal,' he said. 'At some
point in a gun's life it becomes bent. Where that is happening has been hard to
find. This puts another link in a chain. We may have a trail to follow.'
Pito says the NFLMS should be fully operational by the end of next year, and is
partly blaming its lengthy development on a reluctance to change within forces.
'It should be live everywhere by the end of next year, although it could also be
a lot sooner if there is a willingness from forces,' said McArthur.
'There is a lot of resistance to change. What a national system does is force
everybody onto the same standard.'
The NFLMS has also attracted critics who argue that a register of legal firearms
will not help in the fight against illegal firearm activity.
Conservative Lord Marlesford has been critical of the project for some time and
is calling for the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) to look into the delays.
'The whole thing is totally unsatisfactory,' he told Computing. 'The Home Office
has a responsibility to implement legislation and it has failed to do so. It
seems instead to be allowing the police to defy parliament. I believe the PAC
should look into it urgently.'
But Pito says such criticism is unjustified, and that because the project was
rescoped, the organisation has been working on it for, essentially, only three
years.
'This was passed in 1997. We are now in 2005 and the project is still not
there,' said Baker. 'But you cannot say this without understanding what the
issues have been from day one. It is unfair to do so.'
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