Thanks for your responses.
Maru, unfortunately I found neither of those solutions to have worked.
1) Even with the longer frame render times the difference in the fireflies was just as exaggerated.
2) Fractionally reduced glossiness has already been applied to the scene, for this process to work I found it needs to be considerably lower than 0.9 to reduce the fireflies but that also damages the overall quality of the materialisation.
aref3dsmax, on the other hand ive found your solution to work pretty well! With some experimentation of different clamping values and alterations to the post processing I've been able to achieve the desired result without effecting the over all scene. I feel I initially overlooked the highlight clamping settings and assumed they were for compression.
Thank you both again for your input and would recommend the Highlight clamping solution to any one else having this issue.