Firearms licensing data reveals long waits for first-time applicants

First-time firearms and shotgun certificate applicants are waiting far longer than published performance figures suggest, according to the first separately published grant and renewal data from the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC). The figures, released on 13 August for the quarter to 30 June 2026, cover all 43 police licensing departments in England and Wales and confirm the firearms licensing delays that sector bodies have warned about for years.

What do the new figures show?

For the first time, performance on new grants is separated from renewals, and the two tell very different stories. Avon & Somerset’s blended figure of 88.64% conceals a grant rate of 7.59% sitting beside a renewal rate of 97.49%, a gap of nearly 90 percentage points. Devon & Cornwall, Gloucestershire and North Yorkshire show similarly wide gulfs.

Jeremy Hinde, secretary of the British Shooting Sports Council, said the quarter showed “a firearms licensing system with a shrinking certificate-holder base, a slowly eroding national Service Level Agreement (SLA) performance, and a rapidly growing reliance on temporary permits as a safety valve for delay”. He called the pattern “the clearest evidence yet that new-applicant waiting times are substantially worse than the blended national headlines suggest”.

How is the national picture changing?

Certificate holders across England and Wales have fallen to 468,606. Nationally, 70.21% of applications were completed within forces’ own service-level targets, while temporary permits rose 11.5% to 3,449. Humberside alone accounts for 1,007 of them, the highest figure in the country.

There is proof the job can be done well. Nottinghamshire completed 93.71% of applications within its targets while issuing a single temporary permit, and Cheshire, Merseyside, Cumbria and Derbyshire all performed strongly. At the other end, the collaborative units covering Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire, Norfolk and Suffolk, Surrey and Sussex, and the West Midlands and Staffordshire cluster among the worst performers.

What do the shooting organisations want?

The National Gamekeepers’ Organisation (NGO) welcomed the transparency and said the new data “confirms what many applicants and shooting organisations have long suspected: headline force performance figures do not always reflect the delays experienced by first-time applicants”. It wants outstanding application backlogs published next, and advises members to submit renewals as early as possible, provide supporting documents promptly, and contact the organisation if serious delays arise.

The Countryside Alliance said the variation between forces reinforces its campaign for the centralisation of firearms licensing into one body.

What happens next

The NPCC publishes the league table quarterly, so the next test of whether the grant backlog is shifting comes in the autumn. Certificate holders can check their own force’s grant, renewal and temporary permit figures in the full data release, linked below, and anyone facing a long wait can raise it with their shooting organisation.