We have spent three weeks arguing about vape policy in public. Some of it was about business rates. Some of it was about planning permission. All of it was us telling people that the rules being written right now will decide what a vape looks like, where you can see one, and whether the shop that helped you quit is still trading in five years.
You're probably asking yourself: what do you actually want me to do about it?
Here is the honest answer. There is a Government consultation open right now, it closes at 11:59pm on Friday 2 October, and it is the single most useful place a member of the public or a shop owner can put their view. It is also, if we are being straight with you, a slog. It is a long form, written for policy professionals, and most people who open it, close it again.
So we built savevaping.co.uk. It takes about ten minutes and it does three things: it writes to your MP, it walks you through the consultation question by question, and it signs you onto the Relapse Register. Everything it produces is in your own words and you can edit every line before it goes anywhere.
That is the whole ask. The rest of this is why it matters.
What is actually being proposed
The consultation covers how vapes look and how they are sold. Plain, standardised packaging. Devices restricted to white, black or grey. Flavour names cut back to single words. And vapes taken off open display in every shop in the country, with the only exemption under exploration a limited one for pharmacies.
We agree with more of it than you would expect
No cartoon characters. No mascots. No flavour names that read like a sweet shop menu. No devices designed to look like toys, drinks bottles or highlighters. All of that is aimed at children, none of it has any business in this industry, and Riot backs banning every bit of it. That is in our submission, in writing, without conditions.
We say it first because it is true, and because it is the part of the argument our own industry keeps ducking.
The three things we are fighting, and what we are asking for instead
One. Enforce the law that already exists.
Selling a vape to anyone under 18 has been illegal for years. Every underage sale happening in Britain today is already a crime. The problem is not a gap in the law, it is a gap in enforcement: Trading Standards teams are stretched, and reports of underage and illegal sales routinely go unactioned. Layer new restrictions on top of that and you punish the shops that check ID every day while the rogue sellers who created the problem carry on exactly as they were.
There is a warning available. Australia restricted legal vape sales hard, enforcement never kept pace, and roughly 80% of its vape market is now illegal: untaxed, unregulated, no age checks, profits to organised crime. Restriction without enforcement does not reduce harm, it just moves it somewhere nobody can see it.
We are asking for: funded, directed enforcement of the law we already have, before new restrictions land on compliant businesses.
Two. No blanket display ban.
We support taking vapes out of sight in supermarkets and convenience stores. That is where a display sits next to the confectionery, where the shopping is impulse-driven, and where a curious teenager sees it.
A specialist vape shop is the opposite of that. Nobody walks in by accident. The premises are age-restricted, so a child cannot be in the room to see a display in the first place. A display ban there cannot reduce a child's exposure, because there is none to reduce. All it does is hide the product from the adult smoker who walked in specifically to stop smoking, in the one shop on the street with trained staff to help them do it.
So we are proposing something specific: a licensed specialist vape retailer class, built inside the premises licensing regime the Tobacco and Vapes Act already created, carrying the right to controlled in-store display. Not a self-declared over-18s sign that any shop could stick on a door. A registered, inspectable, revocable licence with conditions we are volunteering ourselves: nothing visible from outside the premises, Challenge 25 at the door, age-restricted premises, and the licence goes for any breach.
This is not a novel idea. Specialist tobacconists have held exactly this kind of display exemption for more than a decade, and Trading Standards have enforced it without drama. Six European countries run some version of it. And Action on Smoking and Health, who campaign for tighter regulation of companies like ours and will carry on doing so, called in 2023 for the Government to "prohibit instore promotion of e-cigarettes with exemptions for age restricted specialist vape shops".
We are asking for: controlled display rights for licensed, age-verified specialist premises, with the guardrails written into the licence.
Three. Do not dress the cure like the disease.
Plain packaging was designed for a product with no safe level of use. It exists to make cigarettes repellent. Apply the same treatment to the thing that gets people off cigarettes and you send every smoker in the country one message: this is just as bad as what you are already doing.
That message is false, and the Government's own evidence says so. Its packaging impact assessment rejected tobacco-style dissuasive packaging precisely because it could risk conflating the level of harm between tobacco and vaping products, and it lists among the possible unintended consequences that restrictions could shift harm perceptions and reduce the number of smokers willing to use vapes to quit. Meanwhile 54% of adults already wrongly believe vaping is as harmful as smoking, or worse, when the Government's own consultation puts vaping at least 95% less harmful.
The same logic covers devices and flavour names. Restricting every device to white, black or grey does nothing to a teenager, it just strips adult products of their identity while leaving the actual driver of youth appeal, products styled as toys and drinks and gadgets, untouched. Ban the mimicry. Leave adult design alone.
And there is already a mechanism sitting there. Every vaping product sold legally in the UK passes through MHRA notification before it reaches a shelf. Extend that notification to assess packaging and device design against a defined child-appeal standard, and the regulator can block anything aimed at children, product by product, adapting as the tactics change, while responsible adult products stay visibly different from cigarettes.
We are asking for: no plain packs and no colour bans. Block child appeal at MHRA sign-off, keep vapes looking clearly different from tobacco, and keep adult flavours on the shelf.
Ten minutes, three actions, one deadline. savevaping.co.uk
The bit nobody explains: how these responses actually get counted
This is the part that changes whether your ten minutes is worth anything.
Consultation responses are read and coded. When hundreds of people submit identical text, because a campaign handed them a script to copy and paste, the analysts recognise it and treat the whole pile as a single point of view. That is not a conspiracy, it is standard practice, and it is why petition-style campaigns tend to sink without trace.
An individual response, written in your own words, does not get bundled. It has to be read and counted on its own.
Which means the most useful thing you own here is the thing no campaign can fake: your actual experience. How many years you smoked. What you had already tried before vaping worked. What would have happened if, the day you walked in, everything on that wall had looked like a packet of cigarettes. What the person behind the counter in your local shop actually did for you.
That is why the portal does not hand you a script. It asks you a handful of questions and builds your letter and your consultation answers from your answers, and then it lets you edit every word before anything is sent. Nobody at Riot writes your response. We just take the form apart so it fits in a coffee break.
And the Relapse Register
The third action is the one that does not exist anywhere else.
The Government's impact assessments talk about the risk that these rules put smokers off switching. What none of them have is a number for the people already vaping who would be at risk of going back to cigarettes if the flavour, the pack or the shop they rely on disappeared.
The Relapse Register is that number. Every signature is one adult ex-smoker on the record saying what these rules would put at risk for them. It goes into our submission, it goes to MPs, and it is the single piece of evidence in this campaign that only you can create.
It records risk. It does not encourage anyone back to smoking, and it never will.
Your data, protected
Anything you put into the portal is used for this campaign and nothing else. No marketing. No remarketing. Never shared, never sold, never loaded into any marketing system. It is deleted within 30 days of the campaign ending.
If you run a shop, that is the promise that matters: your customers stay your customers. We keep nothing.
If you run a shop
There is a retailer briefing that goes through all of this in more detail, including what to say to customers who ask. It is at savevaping.co.uk/briefing and a paper copy is going out with orders.
Then get your customers on it. Poster up, QR code by the till, mention it to the switchers who trust your advice. One shop that pushes this properly is worth more to the outcome than anything we can buy.
Ten minutes
The consultation closes at 11:59pm on Friday 2 October. Whatever gets written after that date will be written whether or not anybody in this industry, or anybody who quit smoking because of it, said anything at all.
Protect kids: enforce the law that already exists.
Help smokers quit: keep the cure looking different from the disease.
Ten minutes, three actions: email your MP, answer the consultation, sign the Relapse Register.