Sound moderators may soon be deregulated if an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill is accepted. The amendment seeks to remove the current firearms licensing requirements for sound moderators. It was prepared by the Countryside Alliance and the British Shooting Sports Council (BSSC), was tabled by Lord Brady, President of the BSSC, and is expected to be considered by peers at Committee Stage in the House of Lords in the coming weeks. The Crime and Policing Bill is an ideal opportunity to relieve the current burden of the existing regulation on police firearms licensing departments, with no increased risk to public safety. 

The government’s June 2025 response to a consultation on sound moderators stated that it accepted the need for deregulation and as such the amendment proposes to remove sound moderators from existing firearms licensing controls by deleting reference to them from the list of defined ‘firearms’ in Section 57 of the Firearms Act 1968. This would also apply to muzzle breaks and flash hiders. 

At the moment sound moderators, inert tubes attached the muzzle of a rifle to reduce noise and flash also known by the Hollywood misnomer “silencers”,  are licensed in the exact same way as rifles. This creates a huge administrative burden for police firearms licensing departments given that approximately one third of all defined ‘firearms’ are sound moderators. That avoidable burden would be alleviated, allowing licensing departments to focus on licensing actual shotguns and rifles, which has never been more important given the dire administrative state that many departments are presently in and failing to deliver the service required. 

The likelihood of success of this amendment is not certain, despite the fact that both the government and police support deregulation. However, the government in its response did add a nonsensical suggestion to its proposal to deregulate sound moderators – it wants a requirement for their possession to be the holding of a valid firearms certificate. This is both unnecessary and unjustified. Indeed the government’s own justification for this is self-contradictory: “we do not consider that [removing moderators from Section1 firearms definition] will increase the risk to public safety, […] any potential public safety risk would be reduced [by the requirement to have a valid certificate to lawfully possess a moderator]”. Implying that licensing moderators as individual S1 firearms is more risky than the requirement to merely have a licence to possess – a nonsense. 

The Countryside Alliance is actively encouraging all those involved with firearms licensing and peers of all parties to support the amendment in Lord Brady’s name. It would alleviate the administrative burden on police forces with zero increase to public safety risk. The government should take the opportunity presented by this Bill to deliver its policy. If this opportunity is wasted, there may not be another one in this parliament.