Some of what the Prime Minister announced this morning is good.
Stopping shops opening next to schools is good. Giving police twelve months instead of six to deal with premises under criminal investigation is good. Tightening the definition of a vape shop so nobody can dodge the rules by calling themselves a convenience store is good.
We have no argument with any of it. The question is whether it lands on the right shops, and nothing announced today makes sure that it does.
The shops the Government is describing are real
Right now, anyone can open a vape shop. There is no test. You do not have to show that you know what you are selling, that you will check ID, that your stock is legal, or that the shop is not a front for something else entirely. You need a lease and a card reader.
That is how you end up with exactly what the Government described this morning. Shops laundering money. Shops selling counterfeit product. Shops selling to children. It happens, Trading Standards test purchases keep proving that it happens, and there is no point in an industry pretending otherwise.
ASH: "it’s unhelpful to treat all vape shops like rogue businesses when some play an important role in helping adults to quit smoking."
So are the other ones
Every town also has the other kind of shop. The one that has been there eight years, where the person behind the counter knows what you used to smoke, what you have already tried, and why the last thing did not work, and who will spend twenty minutes on a forty pound sale. Shops like that have talked more people off cigarettes than most of us will meet in a lifetime, and they did it without a budget or a press release.
Ask anyone on that high street and they will tell you which shop that is. They will also tell you which one opened three months ago, sells to anyone with a pulse, and will be gone by Christmas.
Both of those are "a vape shop". That is the entire problem, and today the Government identified it correctly without fixing it.
We are not the only ones making this point, and the people making it alongside us are not our allies. Action on Smoking and Health has campaigned for tighter rules on our industry for years and will carry on doing so. Responding to today's announcement, its chief executive Hazel Cheeseman warned against treating "all vape shops like rogue businesses when some play an important role in helping adults to quit smoking".
When the health lobby and the manufacturers reach for the same argument on the same morning, it is usually worth a second look at the policy.
What planning permission can and cannot do
Planning permission asks one question. Should a shop open here?
It cannot ask the question that actually matters. Is this shop run properly?
A planning application can stop a good shop opening. It cannot close a bad one.
Planning rules apply to new premises. So every shop already selling to children, already selling illegal stock, already doing whatever else it is doing, carries on exactly as it is. Untouched. The only people who feel this are the ones still trying to open, and the ones most likely to be deterred by a planning process, a delay and a solicitor's bill are small independents. Not organised crime.
It is a location test applied to a conduct problem.
ASH made the same point this morning, and made it more precisely than we have. The planning changes, it said, would "likely only apply to new premises", while the licensing scheme already in the Tobacco and Vapes Act would apply to "both existing and new shops selling tobacco and nicotine products".
That is the whole thing in one sentence, from an organisation with no reason to do us any favours.
Licensing is the answer, and it is already written down
The Tobacco and Vapes Act 2026 already provides for retail licensing. It has not been switched on.
Switch it on, and build it in three tiers.
- Everyone who sells is licensed. Every specialist shop, every supermarket, every corner shop, every website. A licence you have to earn, that costs you something, and that can be taken away. Sell to a child, lose it. Stock illegal product, lose it. That is a consequence the current system cannot deliver, and unlike planning permission it reaches every shop that is already trading.
- The toughest rules where children actually shop. Most young people are not buying vapes in a specialist store. They are buying them where they already buy crisps. So in any shop a child can walk into, product goes out of sight and age verification is hard edged and properly enforced.
- An approved adult only specialist tier. Age checked at the door. Nothing on display outside, no lit wall of colour facing the street, which happens to be precisely what the Government said today it wants to fix about shopfronts. Then inside, staff who can explain what they are selling to an adult who is trying to stop smoking.
Toughest rules where children shop. Expert support where smokers quit.
Why we are saying this
We do not run shops. We make e-liquid and we sell it to the people who do. Which means we see both kinds of shop, and we would rather not share a high street, or a press release, with the second kind.
As things stand, the shop that helped someone stop smoking after thirty years and the shop selling to fourteen year olds operate under identical rules and get described in identical language. That protects nobody. It does not stop a single child getting hold of a vape. And it makes life harder for the one business on that street that was doing something useful.
License the sector. Inspect it. Set a standard, and take the licence off anyone who fails it.
Including anyone who sells our products.
This is the second announcement in three weeks. Say something.
On 23 July, vape shops were named as "anti social businesses" and used to help fund a business rates cut for everyone else. Today they go into the planning system. The Government has said it will consult on how the new rules work in practice, and there is already a separate consultation open on vape packaging, appearance and display that closes on 2 October.
So if you run a shop, or you stopped smoking because of one, this is the point where your view actually counts for something. Not a petition. The real mechanisms that decide what happens next.
We built savevaping.co.uk to make it quick.
Ten minutes, three actions: email your MP, answer the consultation, sign the Relapse Register.
Do it before 2 October, because every signature is a vaper at risk of going back to cigarettes.