I'm not sure whether I'm being more than usually obtuse, but I'm not sure that I understand what's going on here.
When 'statutory guidance' was first suggested some time ago, I seem to remember pointing out that giving the two most powerful enemies of public firearms ownership in the country the power to produce 'guidance' which had the authority of statute law might in the long term prove problematic for the shooting public.
My main concern was that the disadvantages of the superficially-desirable goal of 'improved consistency' between FLDs might well be made abundantly clear if the improvement in consistency were to be achieved by forcing all forces to apply the law with uniformly-increased inflexibilty mandated by 'guidance' with power of statute.
However, what we now have appears to be the horribly-named and not altogether-accurately redrawn 'Guide on Firearms Licensing law', which replaces a document which we all thought the FLDs should have been 'having regard to' anyway (for why otherwise did it exist?) as well as the 'FIREARMS LICENSING: Statutory Guidance for Chief Officers of Police' to which they really do now have 'to have regard'.
It is interesting to note that many of the problematic areas (e.g. which calibre for what, 'discretionary' conditions) which gave rise to idea that 'greater consistency' would improve things are still found only in the more-easily-ignorable document.
On the whole, I'm not sure how it's going to help at all in its current form, but I can see how it might in future easily be used to do the opposite.