April 2024
The Government, by its own admission, have not quantified the health impacts of fewer people using vapes to quit smoking, making their approach to vape restrictions highly irresponsible. For every adult vaper who returns to smoking because of Government restrictions, there is a chance of another death from smoking, reversing the trend away from smoking for which significant credit goes to vaping.
It is currently illegal to sell vapes to children. Rather than introducing restrictions that will undermine the public health benefits of vaping, we need to focus on (and properly enforce) the law we already have. If the Government were prepared to listen to the vaping industry they would have heard our calls over many years, for a licensing scheme for vape distributors and shops. The industry has a licensing framework ready to go, which would not only tackle rogue retailers who are selling vapes to children, it would raise £50m that would allow Trading Standards to police the law effectively. This isn’t, as some critics have suggested, to slow down the passing of the Bill and we have been proposing this scheme for years before the Bill was introduced. It’s about ensuring we don’t walk blindly into a public health catastrophe characterised by smokers giving up on the idea of vaping, vapers returning to smoking and U18s exposed to significant risk of harm posed by the predicted rise in the black market as a result of the proposed disposables vape ban from April 2025.
Restricting vape flavours, packaging and point-of-sale is treating vapes like cigarettes. Already 40% of people think vapes are as bad for you as cigarettes, yet as the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (yes the government unit within the Department of Health and Social Care, which is behind the Tobacco & Vapes Bill) continues to restate, they’re at least 95% less harmful. If you restrict vapes like cigarettes, less smokers will quit and more will die. It’s not a complicated equation.
Last year a study amongst vapers conducted by market research company One Poll revealed that 83% of vapers said that flavoured vapes had helped them pack in their smoking habits. It also revealed that one in three feared a ban on flavours will lead them back to smoking, representing some 1.5m vapers.
In its submission to the recent vaping consultation issued by the Government which has led to the decision to ban disposables, the Royal College of Physicians highlighted that it did not recommend the wholesale limiting of flavours accessible to adults. Instead, it called for the use of a range of flavours, including fruit flavours to enable smoking cessation in adults. It stated: “The use of flavours by adults trying to quit smoking is an integral part of the effectiveness of vaping as a quit aid. Government should restrict flavour descriptors rather than flavours themselves.”
Finally the impact on the black market for vapes should be of huge concern to the Government, but it appears to be quite the opposite. The government’s £30 million annual enforcement top-up is rightly criticised for being totally inadequate. Annually, £20m will be swallowed up in supporting HMRC and Border Force’s new illicit tobacco strategy, leaving just £10 million in remaining extra funding, which split between England’s 317 local authorities, is far from an adequate solution. Furthermore, Professor Nick Hopkinson of Imperial College London said Trading Standards budgets have been ‘cut by £200 million since 2010’ – so £10m a year is not really comparable.