£9m subscription to hold a shotgun? Hang on a minute...

If you’ve had to apply for a renewal or your first certificate recently, you’ll know from bitter experience that the entire UK licensing system is old, creaking and broken.

We’ve written before about the poor performance of the various forces involved and the extraordinary delays we all have to suffer – whilst swallowing a price hike in February this year and the new medical certificate cost.

But… we’re about to get a shiny new firearms licensing IT system at a cost of £9.3 million from Palantir (more on them shortly). Will it solve our collective woes?

The NHS already has a Palantir system in use under the name of the Federated Data Platform so there must be some sound logic.

But some feel that all that glitters isn’t gold.

The Home Office has quietly handed a three-year, £9.3 million contract to Palantir, the US data analytics giant with deep roots in the intelligence community, to build and run the UK’s new firearms licensing system.

18 companies submitted, 3 were shortlisted and one was chosen. None of the final 3 were SME’s from the UK. Hold that thought.

If you spend your weekends working through a tight pair of crossers or adjusting the comb on a new stock to get your eye perfectly down the rib, this piece of legislative infrastructure might feel a world away from the layout.

But it isn’t.

The mechanics of how we’re permitted to own our guns is shifting from UK IT servers to an overseas proprietary commercial platform and the long-term implications for us shooters looks remarkably expensive.

According to a report by The Register, the CIA-backed firm will now hold the UK’s national records for guns, explosives and poisons under a single digital roof.

We’ve got no problem with the last point, in fact it’s much needed. But the first point feels odd.

For a community that treats gear ergonomics with microscopic seriousness, the government’s choice of technical architecture deserves the same scrutiny we apply to a poorly engineered trigger pull.

The immediate concern we have is the core business model that could be put in play here by Palantir – a subscription.

We have no beef with subscriptions when they make sense. We pay our club memberships via subscription, NetFlix and The Shooting Times are no different either – but this is critical infrastructure, not entertainment.

By outsourcing the platform to a third-party vendor rather than engineering and owning a public system, the government seems to have opted for a software-as-a-service subscription model.

In capital expenditure terms, a bespoke state-built system is a sunk cost, amortised over a few years and owned entirely by the taxpayer after a while. It becomes an asset in many ways.

But a commercial subscription is a permanent financial drain.

When the initial three-year term expires, the data remains locked inside a proprietary ecosystem, leaving the Home Office with almost zero leverage when renewal fees inevitably climb.

Use it or lose it will probably be Palantir’s opening negotiation gambit.

And we don’t need a crystal ball to see how this plays out; we only need to look at how the same company has handled another piece of British public infrastructure.

Just months ago, health officials began quietly evaluating their options to exit a massive data deal with Palantir.

Why?

The NHS is growing uneasy over their subscription costs, vendor lock-in and implementation delays. If the health service is already looking for the eject button from their Palantir-provided platform, one that was supposed to revolutionise public health data, it seems wildly optimistic to assume the Home Office will fare any better with firearms licensing.

When a private company holds the keys to the kingdom, the end user rarely wins because commercial interests come before anything else.

For shooters, the risk isn’t just about data privacy (although that makes us as uneasy as the NHS), it’s about who eventually foots the bill.

Firearms licensing departments across the UK are already notoriously stretched, with turnaround times already way too long due to administrative purgatory.

If the government ties itself to an expensive recurring subscription with an overseas tech giant, those overheads will eventually have to be recovered.

And there’s no prizes for guessing where the revenue to cover those costs is going to come from.

Yep, you and me.

Critical national security databases should be engineered, owned and controlled by the state, not rented from Silicon Valley. It’s as simple as that.

Relying on a corporate subscription to manage the legal ownership of firearms is a short-sighted strategy that mistakes convenience for efficiency. It’s an expensive sticking plaster on a system that requires a deep surgery and structural investment beyond just the IT.

The next time you’re sitting in the clubhouse waiting for your squad to be called, this is a conversation worth having.

We’re looking at a future where the right to step onto the layout with your own gun is managed by a platform the British public doesn’t own, didn’t choose and that’s powered by a commercial model designed to extract maximum value year after year.

That’s a heavy payload for any shooter to carry and soon we’ll have to shoulder it.

It’s a shame that the same consultation and level of scrutiny over the transition from lead to steel wasn’t applied to the transition to this new Palantir licensing system.

But it seems it’s too late to even consider that – the deal’s been done under the cover of relative darkness.