Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, what estimate she has made of the number of imported disposable vapes manufactured in China in (a) 2024 and (b) 2023.

HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) is responsible for the collection and publication of data on imports and exports of goods to and from the UK. HMRC releases this information monthly, as a National Statistic called the Overseas Trade in Goods Statistics (OTS), which is available via their dedicated website (www.uktradeinfo.com). From this website, it is possible to build your own data tables based upon bespoke search criteria.

Classification codes (according to the Harmonised System) are available to assist you in accessing published trade statistics data in the UK Global Tariff. Goods moving to and from the UK are identified by commodity codes. These are publicly available from the UK Trade Tariff at https://www.gov.uk/trade-tariff.
Disposable vapes are most likely classified as commodity code 2404 12 00 90. HMRC does not collect the number of units imported for vapes.

The data we do have on the import of these items, can be obtained from the build your own interactive tables on www.uktradeinfo.com. These tables include country of dispatch (CoD) which gives information on the country of export. If specifically wanting information on country of manufacture/ country of origin (CoO) this is available in the  bulk datasets archive. The data available includes value and weight (kg) of imports.

Published data for 2024 covers January – October only

If you need help or support in constructing a table from the data on uktradeinfo, please contact uktradeinfo@hmrc.gov.uk.