The issue of compliance costs is detailed in paragraph 76 of the financial memorandum, and there is a suggestion that the Police Service of Scotland should not pursue air weapons as a significant priority but deal with issues as and when they occur.
Costs should be broken down into three areas: the financial cost; the human cost, in terms of the impact on communities and individuals; and, of course, the cost of the time that police officers spend dealing with such cases. It might help to spend a bit of time on each area. As the financial cost will be identified only once the process has been worked through to the end, it will be really difficult to answer that question. However, what will inevitably contribute to that cost will be the increase in the number of licensing offences identified and, undoubtedly, reported to the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service. That will impact on the time that the service dedicates to dealing with such matters, which might, ultimately, translate into court time. The reporting time, the time that will be spent by the procurator fiscal and court time are all a considerable drain on police time, and I do not think that it will be acceptable either to the legislators or to our communities for the police to take an inconsistent approach where Joe Soap is deemed to be forgetful but someone else whose jib people do not like the look of gets reported. That is problematic.
The human cost will, of course, be the impact on individuals. I suspect that many tens of hundreds or possibly thousands—which is obviously the same thing; I meant tens of thousands—of individuals out there might well find themselves falling foul of the criminal justice system because of licensing offences. That has not been a feature before, and, because consideration has not been given to the movement of air weapons across borders, the issue applies not just to individuals who are domiciled in Scotland but to individuals who come to Scotland from elsewhere in the United Kingdom.
Although I consider that, in the early days, a potential prosecution, a recorded prosecution or a fixed-penalty disposal being brought against someone will be regarded as a relatively minor thing, the impact on individuals later in their lives could be great. A young person of, say, 18 or 19 years old could fall foul of the criminal justice system and, later in life, when they are going for employment or trying to get a job overseas—the global marketplace changes so quickly and competition for jobs is so vehement—they could find that that has a devastating impact on their future life chances. That needs to be properly understood.
It is suggested that there will be a long intervening period of non-active pursuance, if you like, when there may be enormous quantities of air weapons handed in for surrender. It is really difficult to make estimates about the transportation, physical seizure, recording and holding of those weapons until such time as they are taken away—if indeed they are to be taken away—by a scrap metal dealer.
As I said, the statements that have been made seem to be based on no evidence other than just a finger in the air and the feeling that this seems about right. Until such time as we have a reasonable grasp of what is out there—a reasonable gauge of how many current certificate holders would fall within the ambit of consideration—and how long it is going to take, it is going to be really difficult to accurately predict whether the cost on the service will be negligible. That is the case for time on its own, particularly in more rural areas and in the Highlands. There is a reference in our submission—