Selling a vape to anyone under 18 has been illegal in Britain for more than a decade. Nobody had published how often that law is actually enforced, so at the end of July we sent thirty Freedom of Information requests and asked.
Twenty-six came back, covering twenty-one Trading Standards services and twenty-seven councils. They record 2,850 underage test purchases across three years, 642 of which ended in a sale, and 6,177 reports of underage or illegal vape selling. We have published every figure. This is what it shows.
A shop gets checked about once every eleven years
A test purchase means sending a supervised underage volunteer in to try to buy. Set those against the number of shops in each area and the picture is stark. Across the twelve authorities where the shops can be counted reliably, a shop is test-purchased roughly once every eleven years. In Kent it would take 113 years to reach every shop once.
Compare that with food hygiene. Under the statutory Food Law Code of Practice, even the lowest-risk food premises in England must be inspected at least once every three years, and anywhere handling fresh food considerably more often. A sandwich shop is not a borderline case. It is inspected because the law says it has to be.
You cannot fix a law that isn’t being enforced by writing another law and not enforcing that one either.
There is no equivalent rule for age-restricted sales. Nothing in law sets how often a shop should be checked for selling vapes to a child. That absence is the finding. Trading Standards are not looking the other way. Nobody has ever told them how often to look.
A hygiene inspection and a test purchase are not the same activity, and the point is not that they are. It is that one has a required frequency and the other has none, in the same high street, from the same council. The comparison is conservative three times over: three years is the floor rather than an average, a sandwich shop sits well above it, and the eleven-year figure covers only the authorities where the shops can be counted.
Kent spent £50,000 finding the problem and £108,000 a year policing it
Kent County Council did something most have not. It went and counted, paying about £50,000 for a survey of 5,493 pupils across 33 schools, which found roughly one in ten currently vaping. It then funded a Trading Standards underage sales programme at £108,000 a year.
"In Kent it would take 113 years to reach every shop once"
What that bought, on the council’s own figures, was 23 underage test purchases across three years, none at all in 2023/24, in a county with 865 shops that could sell a vape. Kent also received 603 reports in the same period. That is one test purchase for every 26 reports, and it could not say how many led to enforcement action.
Kent is not the villain here. It spent its own money to find the scale of the problem, and its testing rose from zero to thirteen to ten as the funding arrived. The honest reading is more damning: £108,000 a year buys about eight test purchases a year across a county of 1.6 million people.
Most councils cannot say what happened to a complaint
Councils here received more than five reports a day about underage or illegal vape selling. Nine authorities hold 2,750 of them with no record of what was done about any, two of them refusing to answer on cost grounds because finding out would mean opening every file by hand. Glasgow cannot count its reports at all, because every complaint is logged as a generic service request. One council in the country could answer: Croydon supplied outcomes report by report and had acted on 15 of 124.
A missing count is a recording failure, not evidence of inaction, and the distinction matters. Birmingham cannot produce one, and in the same period seized illicit goods worth nearly ten million pounds including more than 200,700 illegal vapes. It enforces hard. It simply does not record the link between a complaint and an outcome, because nothing requires it to.
This is not happening where people assume
The data is consistent about where underage sales are actually made, and it is not the specialist trade. Of the sales where a council recorded the type of shop, nearly three quarters, 280 of 385, happened in convenience stores and other general retail. West Yorkshire, the only service to break complaints down by shop type, logged 476 underage complaints about grocers against 224 about vape shops. Kent’s own pupils named corner shops as the most common place they bought vapes.
Councils ran 9.1 test purchases in general retail for every one at a specialist retailer, because they blanket-test general retail and visit vape shops they already hold intelligence on.
A specialist vape shop is an age-restricted premises no under-18 can legally enter, staffed by people who check identification at the door. We want those shops licensed too, with the licence taken away from anyone caught selling to a child, including anyone selling our products, and the fee for that licence spent on the checks.
It is capacity, not willingness
In Glasgow, fixed penalty notices fell from 43 in one year to three the next because, in the council’s own words, its covert camera equipment reached the end of its lifespan and the required evidence could not be gathered. The law did not change. The kit wore out. In Swansea, the council checked four shops in the whole of 2023/24, then raised its budget by 11.3 per cent and its staffing by 20 per cent, and its checks went to 32, then 32 again. Give a team more officers and the work happens.
West Yorkshire Joint Services covers Leeds, Bradford, Kirklees, Wakefield and Calderdale on the largest Trading Standards budget of anyone who answered us. Its funding rose 14.1 per cent while staffing stayed flat at 52, 53 and 51 full-time equivalents, and it tests below the sample average. Budget up, capacity flat, from the biggest service in the study, which is also the best answer to anyone assuming we went hunting for the worst councils.
Sunderland is the case against money on its own being the answer. Its net Trading Standards budget more than tripled, from £62,985 to £191,462, while its underage checks went 25, then 38, then 15. Seizures rose instead, from 4,891 vaping products to 7,009: the extra money went into illegal stock rather than into checking whether shops serve children. In fairness that budget covers the whole service, and the final year’s 15 checks came from three operations, so it is a small base. Sunderland caught shops selling to children 22 times from 78 attempts, every one answered with a written warning.
Across the sample the average officer conducted 2.31 test purchases a year, one every five months, or one for every £22,000 of Trading Standards budget, on the services that supplied both figures, and that budget covers every function the service has rather than vaping alone. These services enforce over 300 pieces of legislation, from food standards to weights and measures to doorstep crime. Underage vape sales is one line on a very long list, and the only one with no required frequency attached.
What these numbers cannot tell you
Every limitation we know about is published with the data:
- A test purchase is not necessarily a separate shop, because a council may test the same premises twice. The coverage figures are a ceiling, not a headcount.
- Testing is intelligence-led rather than random, so the failure rate among shops that were tested is not the rate across all shops.
- Kent states its schools survey cannot be compared with national survey data because the methods differ, and we have not presented it that way.
One check is worth stating. The England-only part of this dataset holds 2,147 in-person test purchases, 25.5 per cent of every underage vape test purchase the Department of Health and Social Care recorded across England over the same period, with a failure rate of 24.4 per cent against the national 23.9 per cent. Close to a quarter of the national picture, behaving almost exactly like the whole.
What we are asking for
None of this is an argument against regulating vapes. We are a manufacturer asking for more regulation of the people who sell them. It is an argument about sequence. The consultation closing on 2 October proposes seven new restrictions, three on vaping products: standardised packaging, limits on device appearance, and rules on where stock can sit. It proposes nothing on enforcement. You cannot fix a law that isn’t being enforced by writing another law and not enforcing that one either.
Plain packaging will not test a single shop. If nobody has the capacity to check, changing the colour of the box is not an answer.
Four things would do more for underage sales than any change to a pack design.
- The retail licensing scheme already passed in the Tobacco and Vapes Act 2026 and never switched on. Every seller licensed, the licence revocable for breaches.
- A statutory minimum test purchase frequency for age-restricted products, mirroring the one food hygiene has. A required cadence is what makes food inspection happen.
- A national recording standard, so councils can say how many reports led to action. Most cannot, and it is fixable at almost no cost.
- The licence fee used to fund that enforcement, so the scheme pays for the checks that make it mean anything. None of the other three work without it.
Plain packaging will not test a single shop. If nobody has the capacity to check, changing the colour of the box is not an answer to underage sales. It is a distraction from it.
What you can do
The consultation closes at 11:59pm on Friday 2 October 2026, and after that the decision gets made without you. We built a free portal at savevaping.co.uk, because the official consultation is a long form written for policy professionals and most people who open it close it again. It takes about ten minutes: a letter to your MP, a guided response, and the Relapse Register, a record of former smokers who say these rules would put them at risk of returning to cigarettes.
Visit savevaping.co.uk for more information.
