Vape shops in Britain have been a rogue industry for years now, with unlicensed, unvetted proprietors selling dangerous products not just in plain sight, but radiating with the neon glow of dozens of garish window displays. In fact, 90 percent of vapes in the United Kingdom now come from China.
These are proving to pose a threat not just to public health, with teachers and healthcare workers sounding the alarm over a terrifying surge in teenage psychosis linked to illegal, often spice-laced vapes sold to minors, but to the public realm, with an unregistered vape shop in Glasgow causing a fire that gutted a 175-year-old landmark building and shut down Scotland’s largest railway station for over a week this past March.
The Government is acutely aware of the growing problems associated with vape shops. Earlier this year, Britain’s Home Office had to allocate £30 million and dozens of National Crime Agency agents and police officers to a special task force to do something about the estimated £1 billion in illicit cash laundered through vape shops and other high street businesses by organized crime. Police forces have also brought a number of cases against dubious shop owners and staff using them as bases to lure and groom children with colorful, flavored products.
So the question is, why is it still the case that anyone can open a vape shop, without a license, without an inspection, without even a background check? Why won’t the Government impose some order?
ON THE BOOKS, BUT NOT IN FORCE.
In fact, it already has. The Tobacco and Vapes Act received Royal Assent on April 29, 2026. It includes a belated but much-needed requirement for vape shop owners and their staff to acquire personal licenses and premises licenses to sell. It also bans vapes from effectively being marketed to minors with bright colors, childish branding, and synthetic flavors. Crucially, it includes a range of stringent new penalties for rogue operators who fail to abide by the new rules.
Are vape shops already a solved problem, then? No, because having a law on the books is no use if it’s not in force, and the Tobacco and Vapes Act is nowhere near being in force. Ministers have the weapons they need, but they haven’t drawn them, with license requirements and display bans not set to come into force until after a lengthy “consultation” process. Not only is this process not near completion, it still hasn’t started. It doesn’t even have a start date.
This lack of urgency is hard to understand, given the scale of the problem the country is facing. Two illegal vapes a minute are being seized nationwide, and this figure would likely be far higher if Trading Standards funding hadn’t roughly halved over the last decade, while the number of vape shops has exploded by 1,200 percent over the same period.
THE COST OF WAITING.
Every month that passes without action, the problem grows more unmanageable, and the threat to public health increases. All it takes to get a vape on a British shelf is filling in a simple online form; there’s no safety inspection, no testing, and no meaningful verification of the ingredients. Many of these products are sold to children. Researchers are increasingly finding that they are contaminated not just with illicit drugs like spice, but with dangerous, neurotoxic heavy metals like lead and cadmium.
Meanwhile, legitimate businesses are being penalized for doing things the right way. Regulated, traditional tobacconists are steadily declining, and for every new vape shop that springs up, seven licensed local pubs close down. The status quo is not tenable for business, not tenable for public health, and not tenable for the authorities struggling to keep a lid on a sector spreading too far and too fast for them to keep up with.
Ministers have the powers to tackle this. They need to use them, and they need to use them now, not years from now.
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