17/07/2026
The government are currently consulting the public on proposed changes to firework legislation. It is ESSENTIAL that you take part, otherwise we stand to lose our access to fireworks in many ways.
Fill in the form here after reading the guidance below:
https://ditresearch.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_eg0jcixPsRnv1NY
To assist you in providing evidence against these ridiculous and dangerous proposals, the British Fireworks Association have produced guidance which we have replicated with permission below. Please have a read and then fill in the consultation form with as much evidence as possible.
BFA Member Consultation Response Guide
Consultation: Fireworks and pyrotechnics in the UK (Closing 7 October 2026)
Section 1: F2 and F3 Product Restrictions
Question 1:
Are there any other particular F2 and F3 fireworks products that you think the general public should not be allowed to buy? Please state which products and give your reasons.
● Recommended Response:
○ No.
● Justification:
○ The existing restrictions on Category F2 and F3 fireworks under the UK version of the Pyrotechnic Articles (Safety) Regulations 2015 are already amongst the most stringent in Europe. Legitimate consumer products undergo exhaustive safety testing, chemical composition limits (including strict flashpowder controls), and rigorous UKCA/CE conformity assessments.
○ Further bans on compliant, highly regulated F2/F3 products will do absolutely nothing to reduce anti-social behaviour. Individuals who engage in fireworks misuse or street disorder often do not purchase legitimate, high-quality products from licensed, "bricks-and-mortar" retailers; they source illegal, non-compliant explosives from social media bootleggers and international black-market.
○ Banning additional legal categories simply penalises law-abiding families, destroys the commercial viability of multi-generational UK retail businesses, and actively drives consumers directly into the hands of unregulated, dangerous black-market operators. This has been confirmed by enforcement authorities in the UK.
Question 2:
If more products are added to the regulation 33 banned list, what consequences might there be for consumers, industry, enforcement authorities, professional users, and others? Please give your reasons.
● Recommended Response / Justification:
○ Consequences for Consumers: Banning more legal products will severely restrict safe, traditional family and community celebrations (such as Bonfire Night, Diwali, Chinese New Year, and New Year's Eve). Deprived of safe, regulated items, consumers will either pay exorbitant prices for extremely limited legal stock or—far more dangerously—will turn to online grey markets and backstreet sellers to source prohibited products, significantly increasing the risk of domestic accidents and severe injuries. The black market already exists, and greater restrictions will be a boon for it.
○ Consequences for the Industry: The economic fallout would be catastrophic. The UK fireworks industry operates on an extremely long and highly leveraged supply chain, with orders and manufacturing in China planned up to 18–24 months in advance. Sudden additions to the banned list would result in millions of pounds of instantly write-off, unsellable inventory. This would trigger widespread bankruptcies, immediate job losses in warehousing, logistics, and retail, and the total collapse of hundreds of independent UK family businesses. This is further worsened by the ongoing manufacturing and shipping paralysis in Liuyang, China, which has already pushed business margins to breaking point.
○ Consequences for Enforcement Authorities: Policing would become an operational nightmare, something highlighted to MPs in 2019 by then ACC Andy Prophet. Currently, licensed retailers operate under strict oversight, enforce rigorous "Challenge 25" age-verification, and maintain safety-compliant, fire-segregated storage. Adding products to the banned list will push the trade completely underground. Police, Trading Standards, and Border Force will be forced to hunt an invisible, untraceable black market operating via encrypted messaging apps and undeclared cross-border freight, diverting already stretched public resources.
○ Consequences for Professional Users: Category F4 display companies rely heavily on the bulk hazardous cargo shipping lines and logistics infrastructure funded by the high-volume consumer retail market. If the consumer market collapses, shipping lines will refuse to carry explosive Class 1.3G cargo to the UK due to low volumes. This will make major, highly regulated public displays economically unviable, destroying a proud British cultural tradition.
○ Consequences for Emergency Services: A surge in non-compliant, smuggled imports (which lack English-language safety instructions, UK safety distances, and proper manufacturing quality control) will inevitably lead to a higher rate of injuries, fires, unstable malfunctions, and emergency call-outs.
○ There is historical evidence that illegal bangers etc from Europe are flown to the UK on commercial airlines. Also within the UK illicit product is transported unwittingly by Royal Mail and may in a great number of cases be transported by air.
Question 3:
Do you agree that regulation 33(1)(g) should be amended to make explicit that a firework comprising more than one shot tube is banned from sale to the general public? Please give your reasons.
● Recommended Response:
○ Strongly Disagree.
● Justification:
○ A firework "comprising more than one shot tube" is the exact technical and legal description of a cake, barrage, or combination firework. These products are the absolute bedrock of the UK consumer fireworks market, representing over 70% of all F2 and F3 retail sales.
○ If this amendment is intended to ban multi-shot cakes and barrages from public sale, it would instantly destroy the UK consumer fireworks industry overnight. No importer, distributor, or specialist retailer could survive such a sweeping restriction.
○ From a public safety perspective, cakes and barrages are scientifically the safest fireworks available to the general public. They are heavy, flat-bottomed, stable blocks that are secured to the ground, firing vertically in a highly controlled, pre-engineered sequence. Banning them would force consumers back to single-shot items, which carry inherently higher operational safety risks in confined garden environments.
○ Critical Safety: Consumers would still want to create a good display and would therefore purchase many single-shot fireworks. This means that instead of lighting one item and walking to safety, they may repeat this a hundred times, a 100-fold increase of them being in the most dangerous part of firework use – ie lighting one. This may also lead to situations where consumers attempt to link/fuse fireworks together themselves, or produce homemade versions of multishot fireworks.
○ If the government's intention is to target a niche, specific product type, the drafted phrasing is extraordinarily dangerous and legally clumsy. Any attempt to alter Regulation 33(1)(g) to restrict multi-shot cakes must be completely rejected.
Section 2: Lower-Risk and F1/P1 Pyrotechnics
Question 4:
Do you agree that the age limit for purchasing Christmas crackers should be removed? Please give your reasons.
● Recommended Response:
○ Strongly Agree.
● Justification:
○ Christmas crackers are classified as Category F1 pyrotechnics but present a negligible, near-zero safety hazard.
○ Maintaining an active age limit (historically 12 years of age) on what is universally regarded as a harmless, traditional family table decoration is an unnecessary, absurd administrative burden for supermarket staff and independent retailers.
○ Removing this age limit is a sensible, common-sense deregulatory measure. It allows Trading Standards and police to focus their limited resources on actual high-risk enforcement—such as targeting illegal online sales of F2/F3 fireworks to minors—rather than auditing the sale of festive table decorations.
Question 5:
Are there any other specific F1 and P1 pyrotechnics that should have their regulatory requirements increased or decreased? Please state which products, what regulatory requirements you think they should have and give your reasons.
● Recommended Response:
○ No changes to increase requirements; maintain the current robust frameworks.
● Justification:
○ Category F1 (low-hazard indoor items, sparklers) and P1 (specialist pyrotechnics like smoke flares) are already governed by exceptionally robust safety standards, transport regulations, and storage licensing requirements.
○ The current age limits (16 for F1, 18 for P1) and Net Explosive Quantity (NEQ) limits are perfectly balanced. Any further regulatory tightening on P1 items would create pointless, damaging red tape for maritime safety, agricultural smoke products (such as pest control), and sporting events, with zero measurable safety benefit to the public.
Section 3: Decibel Levels
Question 6:
Do you agree the decibel level of fireworks consumers use should be lowered? Choose one of the following options:
● Recommended Response:
○ No, the maximum noise limit for fireworks should remain at 120 dB (A,imp).
● Justification:
○ The current 120 dB (A,imp) limit is an internationally harmonised safety standard established under BS EN ISO 17201. It is measured at the appropriate safety standing distance (8 metres for F2, 15 metres for F3), which ensures that the actual sound level reaching a human ear or nearby observer is already significantly lower and entirely safe.
○ Lowering the statutory limit to 110 dB or less is a logarithmic reduction. A 10 dB drop represents a 90% reduction in acoustic energy and cuts perceived loudness in half. It is physically and chemically impossible to manufacture traditional aerial display fireworks (which require lift charges and bursting charges to safely disperse visual effects in the sky) under such a restrictive cap.
○ A lower limit would act as a de facto, backdoor ban on almost all Category F3 and the vast majority of Category F2 fireworks, rendering traditional family displays a thing of the past.
○ Furthermore, "low-noise" fireworks already exist on the UK market as a voluntary consumer choice. Forcing a statutory lower limit completely removes consumer freedom and, critically, will drive the demand for traditional "loud" fireworks directly to the un-tested, highly dangerous criminal black market.
Question 7:
What might be the positive impacts of reducing the maximum decibel level of fireworks available to the general public? Please explain your answer, providing evidence where possible.
● Recommended Response:
○ None / Negligible positive impacts.
● Justification:
○ While animal welfare and noise reduction are highly emotive issues, a statutory decibel reduction on legal fireworks will completely fail to achieve these goals.
○ The individuals responsible for anti-social noise, street disorder, and the deliberate distress of animals do not use legal, 120 dB regulated products purchased from compliant UK retailers. They use smuggled, non-compliant, ultra-loud European flash bangers (which often exceed 130–140 dB) and illegally sourced F4 professional-grade material.
○ Reducing the legal limit will simply destroy the legal trade while leaving the criminal black-market noise levels completely unchanged. Therefore, pets, wildlife, and vulnerable people will experience no actual reduction in anti-social noise—only the loss of safe, structured family events.
Question 8:
What might be the negative impacts of reducing the maximum decibel level of fireworks available to the general public? Please explain your answer, providing evidence where possible.
● Recommended Response / Justification:
○ Severe and Catastrophic Economic Collapse: It would render over 90% of current F2 and F3 product ranges illegal overnight. UK importers and retailers would be left holding hundreds of millions of pounds of obsolete, unsellable inventory. This would force the immediate closure of seasonal and year-round pyrotechnic businesses, resulting in thousands of redundancies.
○ Unprecedented Surge in the Black Market: Legitimate consumer demand for traditional fireworks will not disappear; it will simply shift entirely to the illicit black market. Heavily leveraged European exporters (specifically from countries like the Netherlands, where consumer fireworks are restricted and massive stock dumping is a threat) will flood the UK with non-compliant, smuggled stock. This is fact, after greater restrictions were introduced in Germany and the Netherlands, authorities seized of 500 tons of illegal black market fireworks, and stated that this was just a small proportion of what was being sold on the black market. This is exactly what would happen in the UK.
○ Compromised Public Safety: Smuggled, unregulated products completely bypass UKCA/CE safety testing, lack English-language instructions, contain highly unstable chemical compositions, and are far louder than 120 dB. Furthermore, black-market sellers do not enforce age limits, meaning highly dangerous explosives will become easily accessible to children and youths via online platforms.
○ Loss of Community and Cultural Cohesion: Traditional, safe, and regulated back-garden celebrations—which bring families and diverse cultural communities together—will be effectively hollowed out and banned by stealth.
Section 4: Implementation and Lead-In Times
Question 9:
How much lead in time would businesses need to prepare for the changes proposed in this consultation and why? Please state a lead in time in months or years, and explain your answer, providing evidence where possible.
● Recommended Response:
○ A minimum of 7 to 10 years.
● Justification:
○ The global fireworks sector operates on an exceptionally long, rigid, and complex international supply chain. Orders for raw materials, manufacturing in China, shipping logistics, and UK warehousing are planned and funded up to 24 months in advance.
○ If any technical changes are mandated (such as formulating lower-decibel chemical compositions), product development, stability testing, and mandatory UKCA/CE conformity assessments by approved bodies will take a minimum of 18 to 24 months per product line.
○ This is heavily compounded by the current manufacturing and shipping crisis in Liuyang, China, where safety incidents and customs paralysis have severely disrupted global stock flows.
○ Any transition period of less than 7 to 10 years would fail to allow UK businesses to safely sell through their existing, highly regulated inventory. This would force massive, un-compensatable financial write-offs that would bankrupt the vast majority of UK importers and distributors. In addition to this, it creates a situation where genuine lawful business might be tempted to sell stock illegally to try and recover some of the losses as they have no other way to do so.
Question 10:
What other things should we consider when setting a lead in time? You may wish to reference the impact on people who buy fireworks, enforcement bodies, police or the general public.
● Recommended Response / Justification:
○ Safe Disposal of Prohibited Stock: If products are banned or restricted under a short transition window, hundreds of tonnes of "obsolete" explosives will be stranded in UK warehouses. Legitimate businesses cannot easily or cheaply dispose of explosives. A short lead-in time introduces a severe public safety
hazard, as cash-strapped businesses may struggle to afford specialist hazard disposal, leading to unsafe storage practices.
○ Enforcement Body Capacity: Trading Standards, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), and local licensing authorities are already severely under-resourced. Forcing a rapid regulatory transition will overwhelm these bodies with testing, verification, and enforcement duties, taking vital focus away from tackling the highly dangerous illegal online black market.
○ Border Force and Port Security: A sudden ban will instantly trigger a massive smuggling operation at UK ports (particularly cross-Channel freight from the Continent). Border Force will require several years to scale up detection, hazardous cargo training, and interception capabilities to handle this new threat of undeclared explosive transport.
○ The "Double Whiplash" Effect: Forcing a short transition during a time of extreme global supply chain stress and domestic inflation will guarantee the immediate bankruptcy of seasonal independent retailers, resulting in vacant high street premises and lost tax revenues for local authorities.
We are inviting views and evidence on the impact and use of fireworks.
