Galactic Update: July 2026

The Elephant in the Room: Ten Minutes That Actually Count

Every year we get complaints. Every year we get the letters and the local news pieces and the petitions, and every year it has got a bit louder. I have always taken the view that it is noise, in both senses, and that the rules we have are sensible and hold. I am not taking that view this time.

This one is different because it is the Government asking the questions, with a deadline attached and a response form at the end of it. Somebody is going to answer those questions. The only thing in doubt is who.

You have probably seen something about it already. It has been all over Facebook for a fortnight, and a fair bit of what is circulating is stretched well past what the document actually says, which does us no favours at all. So I read the consultation properly. Here is the straight version.

The Office for Product Safety and Standards, which sits inside the Department for Business and Trade, published Fireworks and pyrotechnics in the UK on 16 July 2026. It runs for twelve weeks and closes at 11:59 pm on 7 October 2026. Anyone can respond. You do not need to be in the trade.

There are three proposals in it.

One, noise. The consumer limit today is 120 decibels, measured at a set standing distance for each category. The Government's actual proposal is to bring that down to 110 decibels, which it estimates would affect "around one-third of current fireworks products available to consumers". Question 6 also asks for views on going further, to 100 or 90 decibels, and it keeps "no change, stay at 120" on the list as an option you can pick. Worth being precise here, because the 90 decibel figure is the one doing the rounds online as though it were the plan. It is one of five boxes on one question. The proposal is 110.

Two, the banned list. This is the one, and it has had a fraction of the attention the noise question has. I will come back to it properly below, because it deserves its own section.

Three, the low-risk categories. A review of F1 and P1 products, which is mostly housekeeping and includes a proposal to scrap the minimum age on Christmas crackers. Genuinely.

Question 3 is the one that matters, and almost nobody is talking about it

The Government intends to "clarify in the 2015 regulations that fireworks comprising of multiple shot tubes are banned" from sale to the public. Question 3 asks whether regulation 33(1)(g) should be amended to make that explicit.

Read that phrase plainly. "A firework comprising more than one shot tube" is a cake. It is a barrage. It is a compound. It is the thing in the middle of almost every display anybody reading this has ever fired, and it is the overwhelming majority of what we sell. The British Fireworks Association puts cakes and barrages at over 70% of all F2 and F3 retail sales. From where I sit, that is, if anything, an underestimate. Take multi-shot fireworks off the consumer shelf, and there are hardly any consumer fireworks left worth the name, and no back-garden display worth standing outside for.

Every single one of these is "a firework comprising more than one shot tube". This is one pack, off our shelf, and it is a fair picture of what Question 3 is asking about.

Here is the part that made me sit up. The word being used is "clarify", as though the law already says this and the wording just needs tidying. It does not. The British Fireworks Association's letter to OPSS this week points out that OPSS themselves previously clarified the opposite: that regulation 33(1)(g) restricts specific high-risk items, shot tubes over 30mm bore or with report effects, and that the prohibition only extends to batteries built from those already-restricted items. Not standard consumer cakes.

So this is not a clarification. On the trade's reading, it is one of the largest restrictions ever proposed on British consumer fireworks, masquerading as a drafting tidy-up. And the wording is ambiguous enough that the industry has spent a fortnight arguing about what it actually means, which tells you everything about how it will be read by the several thousand members of the public who answer it without knowing what a shot tube is.

The BFA has formally asked the Government to pause the consultation, correct Question 3 and extend the deadline past 7 October. Good. Do not wait to see whether that works. Until somebody official says otherwise, 7 October stands, and a response you filed early still counts if the date moves.

If you answer one question, answer Question 3. Disagree, and say why in your own words: that cakes and barrages are what you actually buy, that they sit flat on the ground on a single fuse and are among the safest things a member of the public can fire, and that removing them would push people towards either loose single shots or the illegal market.

What is not true, and why it matters that we get it right

Now the part nobody is sharing. The consultation says, in its own words: "We do not consider banning the public from buying or using fireworks to be a proportionate response to the current situation." It also declines to restrict F2 and F3 across the board, on the grounds that plenty of fireworks in both categories are already quiet enough.

No rocket ban is proposed anywhere in it, although the document does name rockets among products that have been misused as weapons, and Question 1 invites people to nominate products for the banned list. Ice fountains are not named either, though indoor fountains do sit inside the F1 review at Question 5, which asks in both directions, tighter or looser.

On immediate plans for your 2026 displays, before anyone panics. None of this is law. No statutory instrument has been laid, and the Government is proposing a six-month transition on top of whatever it decides. Bonfire Night 2026 is unaffected, so is New Year, and if anyone tells you to panic-buy before the rules change, they are selling you something.

I am setting all that out because I would rather you had the real thing from us than a panicked version from somewhere else, and because a response built on something the document does not say is a response that gets discounted.

But do not mistake any of that for reassurance. It is the only comfortable paragraph in this update. The decision itself is being made over the next nine weeks.

Apathy is what actually loses this

Here is the number that should focus everyone's mind. The Government's own 2025 polling, quoted in the consultation, found that 91% of respondents supported regulatory change. That is the figure sitting on the desk. It did not get there by accident. It got there because the people who want fireworks restricted have spent years turning up, organised, every single time they are asked, posting in Facebook groups, writing to MPs.

We have not. On previous rounds, the people who follow this closely reckon the campaign groups filed several hundred responses between them while the fireworks side managed a few dozen, most of those from professionals rather than the public. I have no reason to doubt it, because I have watched us do it. Put yourself in an MP's shoes for a second and ask what you would conclude from a postbag like that.

The comfortable assumption is that they will never really ban fireworks, that this is the same fuss as every other year, and that somebody else will deal with it. A consultation response count is precisely the instrument that measures that assumption, and on current form it measures us as not caring very much. Nobody in Whitehall has to do anything unreasonable to arrive at an unreasonable outcome here. They only have to count.

So this is not me telling you to panic. It is me telling you that "responsible user who does everything properly and keeps his head down" is, this time, the same thing as "did not turn up".

This is the thing being decided. Not an industry, not a trade body, this.

What I think is actually wrong with it

Here is the framework we already have, which I do not think is unreasonable. In England and Wales, no fireworks between 11pm and 7am, extended to midnight on Bonfire Night and 1am on New Year's Eve, Diwali and Chinese New Year. Scotland is tighter still, and has been since 2022. A 120 decibel cap on consumer categories. An 18 minimum on everything most people actually buy. Registered sellers, registration with your council to store more than 5kg, and statutory nuisance powers under the Environmental Protection Act 1990 sitting over the lot. That is not a free-for-all. It is one of the tighter regimes in Europe.

And the Government's own evidence rather makes the point. Its 2025 survey found that over half of respondents had personally witnessed fireworks being set off in a public place or after 1am, and the consultation notes that both of those are already criminal offences. Separately, when the Health and Safety Executive tested 72 products in 2023, "the vast majority were compliant with the maximum limit". The rules exist, the legal products largely obey them, and people are still watching the law broken in front of them.

That is an enforcement problem. Lowering the ceiling on the products that already comply does nothing to the person letting bangers off in a car park at half one in the morning, because he was never buying compliant products in the first place. It just takes the cake off the shelf of the family who were going to fire it at half eight on the fifth of November.

The more useful question for this consultation is why the powers that already exist are so rarely used.

How to respond, and how not to

The single most important thing: use your own words. There are template responses being passed around, some of them ours as an industry, and I understand why. But the Department has said it will use AI tools to help analyse the responses, and a few thousand identical paragraphs will be read as a few thousand identical paragraphs. Your own experience, in your own voice, counts for more. One sentence about your own street or your own bonfire night beats a page of copied argument.

Two practical things. The form is longer than it looks, but you can skip anything you do not want to answer, so go straight to Questions 3 and 6 if time is short. And it takes ten minutes at most. Short answers are fine.

Respond to the consultation

You can also email your response to fireworksconsultation@businessandtrade.gov.uk if you would rather not use the form. Either way, say whether you are answering as an individual or on behalf of a business. Individuals are not named in the published summary.

And while you are at it, your MP

The consultation is the vehicle that matters, but a note to your own MP does a different job. It puts the issue in their postbag, from a constituent, with a name and a postcode attached. Those get counted too.

Last month one of you replied to the newsletter within twenty minutes to say you had already written to yours about a blanket ban on public sales. A few weeks later you sent the reply back to us. It was a proper letter, not a form response, and whatever you make of the content, the fact that an MP sat down and wrote it at all means the postbag is doing its job. Enough of those landing and it gets harder to ignore.

Write to your MP

WriteToThem.com finds yours from your postcode. If you want a starting point, here is a short letter. Please do change it to sound like you, for the same reason as above.

That is the ask. Ten minutes, before 7 October. If you do one thing off the back of this email, make it that one. I will nudge you again in September, but the ones that get done are the ones done today.

If you want the whole picture in one place, what has actually been decided, what has not, and where the law stands today, we keep a longer explainer updated as things move: UK Fireworks Consultation 2026: What It Means for Buyers.

Four Deliveries in Four Weeks

Right. On to the cheerful bit, and there is plenty of it, because the containers have been arriving steadily all month.

The Gemstone rockets came in at the start of the month, then the Pyroworx restock came through on the 22nd and got topped up on the 27th. Master Class is back at £349.99, 300 shots across a hundred seconds, and it is one of those pieces that just does not let up once it is running. Shell Shocked at £179.99 is 139 shots in just over a minute. King of Kings is back at £99.99, a 25-shot rocket volley that fills the sky in one go.

Then on the 30th, two big Brothers Pyrotechnics compounds landed. Menace To Society at £329.99 gives you 246 shots over three minutes, which is a genuine display on one fuse rather than a finale. The Responder at £199.99 is 200 shots in fifty seconds. Between those two you have most of a night covered.

The Royals

Back in. Two big rockets, saved for the moment.

£44.99

King of Kings

Back in stock. 25-shot rocket volley.

£99.99

The Responder

Landed on the 30th. 200 shots, fifty seconds.

£199.99

Browse New Fireworks

A couple of others worth knowing about. Cube's Anarchy came in on the 28th at £189.99, 113 shots over seventy-eight seconds. And on those Gemstone rockets: Predator Rockets are £64.99 and The Royals £44.99. Both have moved up slightly from the prices I quoted in June, so apologies if you had pencilled in the old ones. That is the shipping situation rather than us.

While we are here, a word about the two that do the heavy lifting, because both are sat in deep stock and neither gets the airtime it deserves.

Psycho at £199.99 is the finale. Not a finale, THE finale. It is a 100-shot, 30mm compound, the best part of two kilos of powder, fanned so wide it takes the whole sky at once, and the whole lot is gone in thirty seconds. Titanium salutes, proper noise, and then silence. Pyroworx make it for us and nobody else, so you will not find it anywhere else in the country. If you are building a big display and you have not decided how to end it, you have now.

And Perpetual Motion at £429.99 does the opposite job: 600 shots over four minutes and ten seconds from one fuse, which is most of a display on its own rather than the end of one. Still, if you ask me, the best firework you can buy in this country. Run Perpetual Motion through the middle of the night and put Psycho on the end of it and you have got a show people would pay to watch.

Everything new goes onto the New Fireworks page as it lands.

Sale Weekend: Put It In Your Diary

Dates are confirmed. Saturday 5th and Sunday 6th September, going live at midnight on the Friday night. That is the one weekend of the year where the prices genuinely move, and it is when most of you do the bulk of your Bonfire Night buying.

New on the Site: Diwali

One new guide went up this month. Diwali Fireworks UK: The Complete 2026 Guide covers the dates, what to buy, the 1am curfew extension that applies to Diwali specifically, and how to put a display together that suits a garden rather than a field. Diwali falls in early November this year, close enough to Bonfire Night that a lot of you will be buying for both at once.