The UK’s Tobacco and Vapes Bill gives ministers the power to regulate vape flavours. At the same time, a £2.20 per 10ml vape tax lands in October 2026. Some countries have already introduced similar measures, with mixed and sometimes unintended outcomes. Here's what the research actually shows.
The logic sounds right. Reality doesn’t follow.
The case for restricting vape flavours is straightforward: fewer appealing products means fewer users, particularly among the young. Strip the market back to tobacco and unflavoured options, remove the variety, and demand falls.
On paper, it's coherent. In practice, some countries that have introduced these restrictions have seen outcomes differ from what was intended, the UK risks following a similar path.
What Happened After the Vape Flavour Ban in the Netherlands
When the Netherlands banned non-tobacco vape flavours in January 2024, the intention was clear: make vaping less appealing and bring usage down. Some users quit, or cut back. But they were far from the majority response.
What followed wasn’t a simple drop-off.
A peer-reviewed study published in Tobacco Control (BMJ) found that around 6% of respondents reported starting smoking after the ban. It's worth being transparent here: the study's authors ultimately conclude that the ban was a net positive. We'd push back on that framing. Because if your policy is designed to reduce harm and it sends even a fraction of people back to cigarettes, the most harmful option on the table, that outcome deserves more than a footnote. A 6% relapse to smoking isn't a rounding error. It's a signal that something in the model broke.
A piece in The Brussels Times highlighted unintended consequences following the ban, including continued access to restricted products and broader questions around enforcement.
Supporting survey data from Dutch consumer group Acvoda points in the same direction. For many users, the ban didn’t remove access, it just changed where that access came from.
That’s the uncomfortable part. Because if a policy designed to reduce harm ends up nudging people back towards smoking, even in smaller numbers, it isn’t just ineffective. It’s working against its own purpose.
This isn’t happening in isolation
Zoom out, and the pattern doesn’t stop at one country.
Across Europe, tighter restrictions are already reshaping the market, just not in the way regulators intended.
A March 2026 study by the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits found that around 48% of the European e-cigarette market now comes from irregular sources, the black market, illegal trade, unregulated imports, parallel supply chains operating entirely outside the regulatory system. That's not a footnote. That's nearly half the market.
In numbers: a €6.6 billion shadow market, projected to reach €10.8 billion by 2030 if current trends hold.
The Fraunhofer study is direct about the mechanism: restrict legal products without consistent enforcement, and you don't destroy demand. You redirect it, into channels with no ingredient transparency, no nicotine accuracy testing, no consumer protections of any kind. The regulated market doesn't go away immediately. But it loses ground, steadily, to an unregulated one that doesn't follow any of the rules.
The Broader Pattern
6%
started smoking after the flavour ban
48%
of Europe's e-cig market now from irregular sources
€6.6bn
shadow market today
€10.8bn
projected shadow market by 2030
Flavours aren’t the problem, they’re the mechanism
For adult smokers, flavours aren’t a gimmick. They’re the reason switching works. They create distance from cigarettes. They make the experience sustainable. And for most people, tobacco flavour alone doesn’t sustain that switch.
The Acvoda survey reinforces this - the vast majority of respondents were former smokers, and most reported improvements after switching. Remove flavour variety, and you don’t just remove preference. You remove one of the key tools that keeps people off cigarettes. At that point, the decision becomes much more familiar.
Now add a tax on top
From October 2026, the UK introduces a flat £2.20 per 10ml Vaping Products Duty. After VAT, that's £2.64 added to every bottle. The government's own documentation outlines the full structure.
What looks like a flat rate is anything but when you apply it across product formats
The formats hit hardest, large shortfills, are predominantly used by experienced adult vapers. People who switched from smoking years ago and for whom vaping is now the settled alternative. The prefilled 2ml pod, the smallest and most accessible format, sees the smallest proportional increase by a wide margin.
If the design intent was to protect the harm reduction pathway for adult ex-smokers while making products less accessible to younger users, the tax structure achieves close to the opposite.
What happens when vaping gets more expensive?
We don’t have to guess. Minnesota already ran the experiment. Research from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that higher e-cigarette taxes were associated with increased smoking and reduced quitting.
The scale is significant. Tens of thousands fewer people quit during the study period, with projections suggesting the impact could reach into the millions under similar tax structures.
And the pattern is consistent, when safer alternatives become less accessible or more expensive, some people revert.
Restrictions don’t remove demand. They relocate it.
There’s another effect that follows closely behind. When legal products are restricted or priced out, people don’t simply walk away. They find other routes. A study found that when legal products become less competitive, consumers shift toward cheaper or unregulated alternatives.
Demand doesn't respond to restriction by evaporating. It responds by moving, to markets with no oversight, no product standards, and no accountability.
Put both together, and the effect compounds
Neither measure is catastrophic in isolation. Together, they create a compounding effect that the evidence strongly suggests will undermine the stated goals of both.
Restrict flavours: legal products become less appealing to the adults using them specifically because they work as an alternative to smoking.
Increase prices steeply: legal products become materially less affordable, particularly on the formats most used by long-term ex-smokers.
Do both simultaneously, and you've created a situation where the regulated, tested, accountable market is both less appealing and more expensive than the alternatives, whether that's cigarettes or unregulated supply. The legal industry doesn't disappear. But it weakens. And as the European data already shows, what fills the gap isn't safer. It's simply less controlled.
The UK still has a choice
The Tobacco and Vapes Bill doesn’t introduce a full flavour ban, yet. But it creates the framework to do so. That means there’s still time to get this right. Because this isn’t speculation anymore. The data exists. The patterns are visible. The unintended consequences are already playing out.
If the goal is harm reduction, the answer isn’t to strip away what makes alternatives work. It’s to regulate them properly. Ignore that, and the UK risks learning the same lesson the hard way.
