Illegal Vapes

Debate between Peter Gibson and Gareth Johnson

Tuesday 16th January 2024 Westminster Hall

[Peter Gibson]

It would not be a Westminster Hall debate without an intervention from the hon. Gentleman. He anticipates two of the points that I am about to come on to in my speech—first, the popping up of these shops; and secondly, the need for licensing. So, I thank him for his intervention.

Legally supplied cigarettes have reached a price that puts them beyond the reach of children’s pocket money. That has been brought about by a raft of measures, including a ban on smaller packets, a ban on advertising, plain packaging, concealed displays and raising the legal age to buy cigarettes to 18. However, we have seen a worrying trend of children taking up the habit of vaping; the latest figures show that some 20% of children have tried vaping.

Those children have taken up the use of a product that is designed to help people to quit smoking, but—this is the important point—they themselves have never smoked. We know that the flavours, packaging and design of vapes are attractive to children, and that vapes are on very visible display in shops, in contrast to the cigarettes that they are designed to replace.

As with the sale of cigarettes, the sale of nicotine-related products is restricted to people over 18, but that restriction is clearly not working. To my mind, many of the measures that we introduced to curtail smoking need to be considered again in addressing this problem.

I have met the parents of children who are addicted to vaping. It is not uncommon to see children vaping in the street and the whole disposable vape industry is visibly responsible for the increase of litter on our streets, which local authorities face huge difficulties in dealing with and which increases the risk of fire in general waste collections.

The Local Government Association is deeply concerned about what to do with the almost 200 million disposable vapes that are thrown away every year in our country, and we should all be concerned about their environmental impact. However, my primary concern is the use and sale of illegal vapes, which do not always comply with our legislation and often have much higher concentrations of nicotine. They are sold with much higher capacities than their legal equivalents. It is estimated that a staggering one out of every three vapes sold in the UK is illicit. They are being sold with no care whatever for the user.

In the north-east, we have seen tragic cases of young children hospitalised as a result of using high-strength illegal vapes. The sale of these products is often concentrated in pop-up mini-markets, which are easily identifiable and distinguishable from reliable and traditional corner shops. Once upon a time criminality hid away, but these operators hide in plain sight. These shops appear quite rapidly, with blocked out windows, vivid lighting and a sparse supply of genuine goods on the shelf and are often, although not always, also selling illegal tobacco products.

I want to put on the record my thanks to Phoebe Abruzzese from The Northern Echo in Darlington for her campaigning journalism on this issue, and I am pleased to be working with her to highlight this problem.

[Gareth Johnson (Dartford) (Con)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for securing this debate. He is right to want to see a clampdown on illegal vapes. They are very different from those produced by responsible manufacturers, which help adults quit smoking and thereby save lives. Does he agree that we should continue to encourage adult smokers to vape, and that we should not throw the baby out with the bathwater over this? The responsible attitude is to allow people to use legal vapes while clamping down on the illicit ones that we see too many of.

[Peter Gibson]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention; he raises a really important point. It is right that we encourage people to stop smoking and that smokers have an array of products available to help them, but those products must be legal. They must be supplied legally and made available in the right way.

Trading standards in Darlington, which is doing a tremendous job led by Shaun Trevor, has had much success over the past 18 months in targeting these traders. Products with a value of over £300,000 have been seized from some 23 retailers. Among those products were almost 20,000 packets of illegal cigarettes. Their sale would have resulted in a massive loss of revenue to the Exchequer—something that I am sure the Chancellor would be interested to learn about.

Last week, I went to visit a number of my local independent corner shops. They report that their tobacco sales have fallen off a cliff. In one instance, a trader of some 40 years reported that his tobacco sales had fallen from more than £7,000 a week to just £2,000. One the one hand, we can celebrate that as it will partly be the result of some people giving up smoking, but we know that the real underlying cause is that the trade has shifted to illegal sales in newly popped-up competition, which is robbing trade from our legitimate traders. Together with the footfall that tobacco sales bring to those shops and the massive loss in revenue, one retailer I visited estimates that his store is collecting nearly £200,000 less duty and VAT because of the sale of illegal tobacco. That is just one shop in one town. Imagine the scale of that lost revenue to the country as a whole.

I have shared my concerns about children vaping and about the availability of illegal products, but for me the most important aspect of this debate is the organised crime that sits behind the illegal supply and sale of these products. I know at first hand of the collaborative work going on between my local council and police in the sharing of intelligence, and I know that they are acutely aware of the damage caused to our community and the local economy. We have evidence locally that the funding for these shops is rooted in organised crime and money laundering. We know that, besides being supplied with illegal tobacco and vapes, children are being used as mules to fetch and carry the illegal products, which are stored off site rather than on the shop premises, or to act as agents by selling the vapes to their friends in the school playground. The most shocking local case was of a young person being groomed for sex with the enticement of illegal vapes. We should be wide awake to the risks in our community to young people who are exposed to exploitation in this way.

I will conclude by putting to the Minister some suggestions of things that can be done that I believe can help tackle these issues. We need to see a nationwide awareness campaign on illegal vapes for both adults and children. We need to see much-increased awareness in our schools of the safeguarding risks to young people posed by the sale and supply of these products. I would like to see all vape products in plain packaging and out of sight, just like tobacco. We need to fully explore a robust licensing system for both vapes and tobacco. We need greater collaboration on intelligence between our very small trading standards departments and police forces across the country. We need on-the-spot fines, set at punitive rates, to tackle the sale of these illegal vapes and tobaccos, and we need to see swifter premises closure orders.

I am sure that all Members are as concerned as I am about the issues that I have shared, and I have no doubt that more worrying stories will be shared throughout this debate. I look forward to the Minister’s response and to a plan that sees us clamp down on this danger.