The Arms Act Service Delivery Group has been out on the road over the past two weeks meeting with staff, the firearms community and iwi members in Wellington, New Plymouth, Taupō, Napier, Palmerston North, Whangaui, Rotorua, Tauranga, Auckland, Whangarei, and Gisborne.

The sessions involved identifying the opportunities and challenges in the current processes used by Police in the administration of the Arms Act. Among other things, there was quite a lot of conversation around the need for consistency in how processes are delivered across districts, or in other words; one way of doing things. There was also much discussion around making it easy for applicants to engage with the processes, and ways to enhance our existing internal support structures to provide more flexibility to the different needs of our community members.

We asked community members what they would expect from modernised process and some of the key focus areas included:

• A consistent approach to delivering processes across districts; one way of doing things
• Active engagement and more frequent communication with the community
• Introduction of online options for licence application and payment, similar to the passport application process and using RealMe
• Retaining a paper application process to run alongside any future online services developed
• Training and guidance for firearms staff across districts
• Providing more visibility of the process to applicants, such as mobile/email alerts and a track and trace facility for online applications
• Use of plain and simple language in the application forms
• More guidance and consistency in the permitting process.

Feedback from these sessions has helped identify some of the biggest challenges across the current processes. The team is on the road for another two weeks and a further update will provided at the end of June. For more detail on the schedule, please view this section of the website.