UK government intensifies anti-vaping, pro-smoking agenda

The government's new proposals are based on a simplistic misunderstanding of youth vaping and casually trample over the needs of the much larger population of adult vapers and smokers.

The government has issued a crowd-pleasing press release on new anti-vaping measures, which it describes as a “crackdown”. I am going through it, putting the government’s text in grey boxes below, but first a summary.

Summary

The main points in my response:

• Many young people who vape would otherwise be smoking if there were no vapes. Vaping is an unacknowledged public health success for young people as well as adults. The government fails to understand this basic concept, and everything it does is wrong as a result.

• The announcement is dominated by youth vaping and comments about youth vaping, yet for every young person who vapes in Britain, there are 17 adult vapers, and many more adults who smoke who could switch to vaping if the government wasn’t working so hard to stop them. They are the main market for vapes. There is no evidence or logic behind the claim that the main vape manufacturers “target youth” - why would they?

• Adults who have already smoked for several decades are the main population at risk and the main public health opportunity, and many adults are successfully shifting from smoking to vapes. These measures and other government anti-vaping policies risk interfering with that highly beneficial, self-funded, and self-starting process. It will have the effect of reducing switching, increasing relapse, and terrifying people who think they have made a beneficial switch (which they have).

• Everything the government is saying and doing will exacerbate the wildly incorrect risk perceptions about smoking and vaping. 54% of adults already think that vaping is as harmful or more harmful than smoking. In fact, vaping poses a small fraction of the risk of smoking. When adults think there is no difference in risk, why would they switch?

• The government and its cheerleaders hope that it will not deter adults from switching to far safer products, but everything they are doing will make this worse. We should judge its public health agenda by what it does, not its vaguely expressed and forlorn hopes that it won’t actually end up doing more harm than good, leaving thousands of adults to live in misery or die in agony.

The government’s press release

EMBARGO: 00.01AM Friday 10 July 2026

Ministers launch crackdown on vapes targeting kids

1.⁠ ⁠Crackdown on vapes marketed at kids with shift to plain white packaging

2.⁠ ⁠Plans to keep vapes out of sight in shops, airports and wholesalers

3.⁠ ⁠Plain packaging for all tobacco products, including cigars and cigarette papers

Plans to stop vapes being marketed to children have been unveiled today (10 July) as part of a UK-wide consultation to introduce plain packaging, restrictions on flavour description rules and keeping vapes out of sight in shops.

Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) report that around one million 11-17 year olds in Great Britain reported trying vaping in 2025. Evidence suggests that colourful packaging, prominent retail displays and child-appealing flavours are among the factors driving young people to take it up.

Stop right there. The framing invalidates everything that follows.

Questions the informed reader should ask…

1. What is the number of 11- to 17-year-olds who vape? It is not one million. That is the number of 11-17 people who have ever tried just one puff. ASH(UK) gives the following figures:
   
   6% of 11–17-year-olds in Britain currently vape. This is made up of 4% who vape regularly (more than once a week) and 3% who vape occasionally (less than once a week). Overall, 19% of 11–17-year-olds have tried vaping.
   
   Given that there are about 5.3 million people aged 11-17 in Britain, that leads to about one million (19%) who have ever tried vaping, 318,000 who are counted as current vapers, but just 212,000 who vape more than once per week.

2. What is the number of adults who vape? Again, we can cite ASH (UK) for consistency. This is what ASH says about adults:
   
   10% of adults in Great Britain currently vape (an estimated 5.5 million people).

   
   So the adult market is 5.5m, and the youth market is 318,000, which is 17 times as many adult consumers as youth. If we also assume adults are likely to use more and spend more, the total adult market, by volume or value, will be well over 20 times the size of the youth market. Can anyone explain why companies would target youth and invite controversy and condemnation rather than the far larger adult market? On top of those already using vapes, there is also a potential market of people who smoke or use both to migrate from smoking to exclusive vaping. That’s where the money is, and that’s where the marketing goes.

3. How many of these young people would be smoking if they were not vaping? If the government cannot grasp the concept of a counterfactual, it should just stay silent and take a basic policy course. The government cannot assume that all these 212,000 weekly vapers would have otherwise never used nicotine were it not for vapes. We can’t get the exact number, but ASH(UK) has some data:
   
   52% of 11-17 year olds who currently smoke also vape, compared with 19% of those who have stopped smoking. Among the 81% of 11-17 year olds who report never having smoked, 9% have tried vaping and 1% currently vape.
   
   So vaping is a bigger deal among young people who smoke, and it may be displacing smoking in people who quit smoking or have never smoked (if they take up vaping instead of smoking). Until ministers can understand this basic idea, they have no reason to introduce measures that will adversely affect a much larger adult population, and possibly harm more young people.

4. How many young people smoke? Because of the obsession with youth vaping, it is now quite hard to get a reliable number for youth smoking, a far more serious issue. ASH gives 4.8% of 11- 15-year-olds (the source is NHS Digital, I think), and the Smoking Toolkit puts smoking in 16-17-year-olds at about 9%. I’ll turn those numbers into an estimate of 180,000 people who smoke in the range of age 11-17. So if youth vaping increased by 100,000 and youth smoking declined by 100,000, would that really be a bad thing? One plausible public health argument is that we need more vaping, not less. What we really need is less smoking by everyone - and vaping helps with that, at any age.

5. How many young people used to smoke? We can rerun the numbers back to the dawn of youth vaping, say 15 years ago (2011), and generate an estimate of about 350,000 young smokers aged 11–17 in Great Britain in 2011. So, in round numbers, youth smoking is now about half what it was. Now it may well have declined to some extent without vaping, but isn’t it obvious that those young people with a tendency to use nicotine have taken up vaping instead of smoking?

The UK government and the devolved governments have launched a consultation that includes proposals to reduce the appeal of vapes to young children, including white packaging with restrictions on text colour, imagery, branding and standardised product information. ]

There will also be restrictions on flavour names to simple recognisable descriptions and vape devices to be white, black or grey.

The consultation is not yet visible. I will link when it is. The aim is to make vaping less attractive to youth, but it will be less attractive to everyone, including youth who would otherwise smoke and the much larger population of adults who smoke and/or vape.

There then follows a litany of anti-vaping playbook platitudes from the new Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, James Murray MP.

Secretary of State for Health and Social Care James Murray said:

“The evidence is clear: there are too many young people experimenting with vapes, attracted by the array of flavours, bright colours and marketing displays.

“We want a healthier future for the next generation, so we must act now to reduce the appeal of addictive vapes to our children.

“Vapes are less harmful than cigarettes and can play an important role in helping adult smokers to quit, but they should never be designed or marketed in ways that tempt children. These proposals are about striking the right balance and I urge everyone to have their say.”

What does any of that even mean? It’s just anti-vaping talking points with no basis in reality. Who is designing and marketing products aimed at children? I don’t doubt there will be some ludicrous product gimmicks the government can point to… but the market is dominated by straightforwardly packaged products that appeal to adults, because that is what the market is.

The real (and only) nicotine-related public health problem is among adults who have already been smoking for several decades. It is not among people under 30 who are already switching to safer alternatives, never taking up smoking to start with, and, if they are currently smoking, are likely to switch to newer, safer products well before they are old enough to suffer serious smoking-related disease risks. New technology has already solved the smoking problem in under 30s… we just have to wait for it to play out. Almost no one currently under 30 will die from smoking-related diseases.

Questions to ask:

1. Can you identify the big youth-appealing products? Is there a vape product that more people aged 11-17 are using than adults aged 18 or over? What is it? If there is, why not tackle that?

2. Is there a way to design a product that will make it less appealing to youth but not less appealing to adults compared to cigarettes? Please don’t cite this study or this study… because in the words of tennis legend John McEnroe: “You cannot be serious.” These measures affect the far larger population who are at much greater risk.

3. How will these measures affect smoking at all ages? As the vaping market is dominated by adult former smokers, current smokers, and people who would otherwise be smoking if vaping did not exist, what effect would this measure have on smoking?

4. How does making vaping less appealing affect young people? If vaping products were made less appealing to youth, what would be the effect on youth smoking? Would it continue to decline? Would smoking become cool again? Will kids find vaping unappealing and do more homework or piano practice, or will they adopt other risk behaviours?

Speaking of James Murray, he’s been sharing his big ideas with the Mirror (10 July 2026):

“Health Secretary James Murray has told the Mirror that it plans to treat e-cigarettes the same as cigarettes”

So Labour, once the party of working people and the disadvantaged, has decided that it can address health inequalities and the sharp socio-economic gradient in smoking by implying that e-cigarettes are no less harmful than smoking.

Standardised packaging has helped reduce the appeal of smoking since its introduction for cigarettes and hand-rolling tobacco in 2017. The consultation proposes to extend these requirements for all tobacco products, including cigars and cigarette papers.

I don’t know of any credible study showing that standardised packaging has been an effective public health measure.

The study that many people rely on when desperate for evidence showed that smoking declined before the implementation of standardised packaging. Yet, they attributed the decline to the policy, as if the main effect was the announcement.

implementation of standardised packaging was associated with a reduction in smoking in England which occurred in anticipation of, rather than after, full policy implementation. Opazo Breton et al., 2021 (emphasis added)

Seriously?

Maybe it reduced cigarette consumption among smokers? No, not that either

The implementation of standardised packaging of tobacco products was not associated with a meaningful change in the mean number of FM or RYO cigarettes consumed by people smoking in England. Buss V et al. 2024

Standardised packaging may have reduced premium pricing and led to a rise in budget brands or illicit whites (branded cigarettes only sold illegally). It probably made people who smoke feel a bit worse about life and themselves (that is reasonably well documented), so that may have had an effect through stigma and ridicule.

But the bigger question for vapes is: what if it did work? Would that actually make anything better?

Let’s expand on that troubling premise with some questions:

1. What is the evidence this will work? Show the evidence for the effect standardised packaging had on smoking, and what was the mechanism that caused the supposed public health benefit? Will that work for vapes?

2. If it does work, will it make things worse? Vaping is an alternative to smoking with much lower risks. Suppose this mechanism worked in the same way for vaping as it allegedly did for smoking: what would happen? Would fewer people switch, more people relapse, would more take up smoking instead of vaping, and would more go from dual use to back to exclusive smoking? Please explain.

3. Will this measure aggravate false risk perceptions? What effect would standardised packaging have on perceptions of vaping risk relative to smoking? Other than cigarettes, what are the precedents for mandating standardised packaging? If there are none that come to mind, what is the rationale for standardised packaging on cigarettes? It was the unique harmfulness of cigarettes, as I recall. So what would applying this measure to vapes do? Might it suggest they are as bad as smoking? Well, as it happens, 54% of adults already believe vapes are as bad or worse than smoking (See ASH again) - and that has been getting worse over time. So, given that vaping is far less risky, how will this help the adult population?

   

Even The Guardian has raised a red flag over this. See: Majority of UK smokers wrongly believe vaping is as harmful as cigarettes, experts find, 5 July 2026. How will these measures reverse that?

Further proposals include introducing positive quit themed inserts directing smokers to resources to quit and health warnings for all tobacco products, as well as removing displays for tobacco products in duty-free settings and airports.

I like the idea of an insert, but if it simply instructs people to give up smoking by using medications or NRT or calling a quitline, it will be little better than having a pop-up finger-wagging nanny in the pack telling people what they have already been told for decades. If the government wants to be bold, then it should use an insert to argue for trying vaping or pouches instead of smoking and resetting the gigantically misaligned risk perceptions about smoking and vaping. Of course, it wants to be bold, but probably in the wrong way.

The consultation follows the passage of the Tobacco and Vapes Act, which received Royal Assent on 29 April 2026, and sets out proposals to create the UK’s first smoke-free generation, protecting children from nicotine addiction, while ensuring adult smokers can still access vaping products to help them quit.

These new measures confirm what I have been saying about this legislation from the start: the legislation is dreadful - an ineffective and pointless measure on smoking (actually all tobacco) combined with a hostile approach to vaping and heated tobacco, which is a valuable response to smoking. This new set of proposals confirms the model: the Act is likely to do far more harm than good, and the uncritical applause for it by public health cheerleaders has been entirely misplaced.

For more on why the legislation is so bad, see:

There is also growing awareness and use among young people of other nicotine products, including nicotine pouches, which are covered by several of the proposed measures.

Yes, these pouches are even safer than vapes and offer an even safer option for smokers and a possible transition pathway for vapers, if they want one. Unless the government conducts itself with some basic grasp of risk, then it will continue to blunder its way through this landscape based on vacuous activist talking points. I recommend this schematic as one way of conceptualising relative risk. This is from an International Monetary Fund policy research document: Taxing Harmful Habits, March 2026.

As you can see, all the non-combustible products are far safer than smoking, and pouches present negligible risk. For public health policymaking to work, the policymaker needs a sense of what risks they are addressing. This provides one categorisation of risks, but it is not necessary to use this particular formulation.

1. What is the government’s assumption about risks? What is the government’s view of the risk of pouches and vapes compared to cigarettes, for the purpose of policymaking?

2. Does it differ much from the chart above? Does the government broadly accept the bar chart presented by the IMF for policymaking purposes, or does it have its own ideas? If so, what are they?

The uncritical applause

Now we turn to comments from the government’s cheerleaders and uncritical followers in the devolved administrations.

Scotland Public Health Minister Maree Todd said:

“Scotland has been a world-leader on a range of tobacco control measures, and while there has been a steady reduction in smoking rates, we know it still damages lives and kills more than 7,000 people a year in Scotland.

“The use of vapes has increased in recent years, particularly among children and young people – with almost one in five children saying they have tried vaping.

“We know that colourful packaging and displays are used as an enticement to children and young people, which is why we are taking action and consulting on options to address this issue. We urge everyone to have their say on how these products are marketed and sold in the future to help protect children and young people and reduce preventable harm in Scotland.”

Scotland has a higher smoking prevalence than the other nations of the United Kingdom (here). It also has worse public health outcomes on almost every front.

Northern Ireland Health Minister Mike Nesbitt said:

“The rise in vaping amongst children and young people concerns me. Restricting the visibility of these products will lessen their appeal, which in turn will reduce youth vaping and prevent future generations from nicotine addiction.

“I consider it vital that we get the views from the public on the future of displaying and packaging of these products. I would encourage everyone to take the time to respond to this consultation.”

Northern Ireland is more bothered about nicotine use than cancer, cardiovascular disease and severe respiratory conditions. It has no interest in the kids who would otherwise be smoking. Adults not mentioned.

Wales Deputy Minister for Preventative and Public Health Nerys Evans said:

“Vapes are being deliberately designed and marketed to appeal to children - with bright colours, cartoon branding and sweet-sounding flavour names that have no place in products containing addictive nicotine.

“It is simply unacceptable and I would encourage urge everyone to support our efforts to protect children’s health.”

Wales has bought the line about marketing to youth without any evidence or analysis. Yes, there is probably some silly branding available that we could point to, but the vast majority of products sold by volume are nothing like that. Silly branding makes a case for addressing silly branding, not for standardised packaging for everything. No thoughts for all those kids growing up in heavy smoking households in Methyr, Wrexham or Rhyl. This is the voice of the detached Cardiff political classes that have lost touch with their roots.

Professor Steve Turner, President of The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) said:  

“Any measures that improve child health are welcome and much needed. As paediatricians, we are deeply concerned by the insidious marketing practices used by tobacco and vaping companies to target our future generations.   

“For those of us working with children every day, it is clear that only strong and meaningful regulation will protect them from the harms associated with nicotine addiction. We welcome this consultation as an important step towards creating a healthier future for children and young people.”

Any measures? Really? What if a measure involved thousands of adults dying or suffering for only a marginal change in risk to young people? Not a single thought here for the much larger and far more at-risk population of adult smokers and vapers. What about the young people who would otherwise be smoking? The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health doesn’t even think about them.

Hazel Cheeseman, Chief Executive of ASH, said:

“Protecting children from harmful vape marketing is the right thing to do. Attractive, colourful branding and images have driven the appeal of vapes to children leading to an increase in use. At the same time there is a careful balance to strike with regulations. While vapes are not harm free, they are significantly less harmful than smoking and vapes have helped millions of people successfully stop smoking in recent years.

“The task now is to thread the needle of making vaping less appealing to children without making it less effective for adults who want to quit smoking. Get that balance wrong, and we risk slowing progress against smoking, the leading cause of preventable death.”

ASH wants to “thread the needle of making vaping less appealing to children without making it less effective for adults”. Great, nice sentiment. But what if these measures do not and cannot do that? What exactly is going to thread this needle? A big raft of anti-vaping measures, and what then?

So there has been an increase in use… but how much of that increase in vaping has displaced smoking? ASH hasn’t even registered that as a question, let alone be able to offer an answer.

List of proposals

The release then summarises the measures. I have discussed most measures above and, in particular, the defective intellectual framework within which the government is operating. But for completeness, a quick response to each.

The consultation seeks views on proposals for vapes and nicotine products, including:

1.⁠ ⁠Introducing plain white packaging with restrictions on text colour, imagery, limited branding and standardised safety information

There is no supporting evidence for this measure, and plenty to be concerned about if it actually worked. It is an implicit protection of the cigarette trade, a false and misleading risk communication, and a barrier to entry and innovation for safer products.

2.⁠ ⁠Restricting flavour names to only simple recognisable descriptions (e.g. “Apple”), banning concept and sensory names as well as names relating to confectionery, sweets, desserts and alcohol

I agree that names should include honest descriptors of flavours and sensory names, and that is normal consumer protection legislation. I see no reason to exclude branding from names unless it is deceptive or frivolous. I welcome the focus on flavour descriptors rather than on banning flavoured products or flavour ingredients, but this proposal has gone too far.

3.⁠ ⁠Mandating manufacturers of vape devices to make them white, black or grey, with no images, limited branding, no cosmetic lights and screens only displaying safety information (e.g. battery level)

I can see a case for preventing gimmicks, but why white, black or grey? To what end?

4.⁠ ⁠Restrict shop displays in the same way as tobacco products.

This would create an implicit risk communication that is anti-proportionate, and prevents new users looking at what they might want to try. Where is the evidence that this will have any useful positive effect and will not provide another protection to the cigarette trade by making the alternatives seem just as bad?

Further measures in the proposals for tobacco products include:

1.⁠ ⁠Extending existing plain packaging requirements and health warnings for cigarettes across all tobacco products, herbal smoking products, cigarette papers and heated tobacco devices.

The government has adopted the utterly false and damaging idea that the important dividing line in tobacco control is “tobacco versus non-tobacco”. It is, in fact, “combustion versus non-combustion”. Non-combustible tobacco products such as heated tobacco and snus have an important harm reduction role, especially for combustible tobacco users who are especially committed to tobacco use.

2.⁠ ⁠Introducing positive quit-support messages inside all tobacco products, including cigarettes, hand-rolling tobacco, herbal smoking products and heated tobacco devices

An opportunity to promote vaping, pouches and heated tobacco as alternatives to smoking and to correct false risk perceptions. The opportunity will doubtless be squandered with tired messaging about quitting smoking with NRT and behavioural counselling. But we can at least hope that the government will do something imaginative here.

3.⁠ ⁠Extending existing tobacco display restrictions to all tobacco related products, cigarette papers, herbal smoking products

4.⁠ ⁠Removing an existing display exemption for bulk tobacconists, including duty-free shops and airports, meaning that tobacco products would be restricted from display in these settings

Logical, as long as it is restricted to combustible tobacco products, not heated or smokeless tobacco products. Heated tobacco is part of the solution to smoking, not part of the problem.

5.⁠ ⁠Restricting heated tobacco devices to a drab brown colour the same as tobacco packaging, with no images, limited branding, no cosmetic lights and screens only displaying safety information (e.g. battery level)

It is absolutely ridiculous to treat heated tobacco products in this way. They are hardly used by young people, but could be a key product in reaching smokers who are heavily dependent on smoking. They offer the closest experience to smoking at greatly reduced risk. The tobacco control activists are more interested in being anti-tobacco than they are in pragmatic solutions to public health problems, which are dominated by smoking.

This consultation is part of wider action to tackle youth vaping. It follows a ban on single-use vapes (1 June 2025), and comes ahead of the introduction of a Vaping Products Duty (1 October 2026), future bans on the sale of vapes from vending machines and their free distribution (29 October 2026), and an end to the advertising and sponsorship of vapes (1 June 2027).

This series of anti-vaping measures has a cumulative negative effect on harm reduction approaches to smoking. The package as a whole will cause a range of unintended perverse consequences:

1. More rebound to smoking, less switching to vaping, and more uptake of competitively priced illicit cigarettes.

2. More illicit trade in vapes that people wish to use in the form they wish to use them. Criminalisation of the supply chain will break many legitimate businesses for no reason. Legitimate business will fail under the weight of taxation, regulation, and government hostility.

3. Risky workarounds. Expect marketing to move to the untamed wilderness of social media, more shipments across borders, and new packaging or vape holders sold separately to vapes, and the vape equivalent of illicit white cigarettes. We don’t even know what the scope of workarounds will eventually be.

4. Degrading trust. It undermines the sense that the government has any idea what it is doing or should be trusted with a public health programme. These measures will ultimately undermine confidence and trust and feed into a negative attitude about authorities and public health

ENDS

[The press release finishes with notes to editors and more comments from notable people.]