TL;DR
oThe UK keeps adding vaping rules, but there are now fewer than 2,500 Trading Standards officers, after a 39% cut since 2010.
oAt current rates, it would take around 11 years to test every shop that sells vapes once, while councils logged more than 10,000 underage vape complaints in three years.
oA legitimate shop with a missing duty stamp faces £2,500. A shop that sells a vape to a child can settle it for £100.
oFrom Australia to the Netherlands, strict rules without enforcement have handed the market to illegal sellers.
"Shocking" isn't a word we use lightly. Most of what we write about vaping policy asks for balance, evidence and a little patience. This time, the word fits.
In the past eighteen months, the UK has banned single-use vapes, passed the Tobacco and Vapes Act and introduced a brand-new excise duty with its own stamping scheme. Since 29th October, free samples and substantial discounts have been banned too. By the letter of the law, vaping has never been more tightly regulated.
On the high street, it doesn't always look that way. Illegal vapes are still being seized by the million, and councils have logged more than 10,000 complaints about vapes being sold to young people in just three years. Meanwhile, the people expected to stop all of this are fewer, and stretched further, than they were fifteen years ago.
A rule only works if somebody enforces it. At the moment, we are very good at writing rules.
Millions seized, and still counting
According to council responses to Freedom of Information requests, Almost five million illegal vapes seized in UK over last three years, Better Retailing. That works out to about three seizures every minute, with an estimated street value of £39 million.
In 2025 alone, 1.27 million illegal vapes were seized, more than 255,000 of them disposables seized after the June 2025 ban. One council, Central Bedfordshire, seized 345,718 on its own.
It's tempting to read those numbers as a success story. Officers are out there, products are coming off shelves, and the system is working.
But a seizure figure measures what was found, not what was there. Over the same period, Trading Standards inspections fell by 5%. Each inspection yielded an average of 142 illegal vapes. When fewer visits still turn up that much, it says less about how well enforcement is working and more about how much is still out there.
Fewer officers, more rules
In England, Trading Standards is the main body responsible for stopping illegal and underage vape sales. It is also responsible for doorstep crime, product safety, fake goods, weights and measures, and around 300 other pieces of legislation.
According to the Chartered Trading Standards Institute, there are now fewer than 2,500 Trading Standards officers across the UK. Between 2010 and 2025, Trading Standards was cut by 39%, almost twice the cut to regulatory services as a whole. At one point, a single London borough was down to one officer.
Is £30 million enough to tackle illegal vapes?
The government has committed £30 million a year until 2028–29 for Trading Standards, Border Force and HMRC to tackle illicit and underage sales. That is welcome. But it is shared between three agencies and the whole of the UK, and comes after fifteen years of cuts.
Spread across every shop that sells vapes, £30 million doesn't go very far. Set against fifteen years of lost capacity, it covers even less.
There are signs the gap is recognised. In 2025, the government funded around 80 apprentice enforcement officers through the Chartered Trading Standards Institute, which said the money "partly addresses" its calls for more resources. London Trading Standards has said around 50 officers are now in training across the capital. It helps, but trainees take time to qualify, and the rules they will enforce are arriving now.
How often are shops checked for underage vape sales?
The outcome is predictable. In one recent Trading Standards review, a third of 422 test purchases of disposable vapes ended in an illegal sale to a young person. Nobody should take any comfort from that figure. It is exactly what the rules were written to prevent.
Underage checks tell a similar story. Riot Labs, an e-liquid manufacturer, analysed Freedom of Information responses from 21 Trading Standards services and 27 councils. Across the 12 areas where shops could be counted, there were 1,549 test purchases against 5,625 outlets over three years. At that rate, it would take around 11 years to check every shop once. In Newham it's about three years. In Kent it's 113.
Underage vape sale complaints to councils
Complaints from the public show the same problem from the other side. A separate round of Freedom of Information requests to councils across the UK, published by Vape Superstore, found 10,818 complaints, reports or referrals about underage vape sales between 2023/24 and 2025/26. Vapes made up around 90% of all underage nicotine complaints, and Lancashire County Council alone logged 696 across every product type.
To be fair to the figures, complaints fell by 14% over the last two years, and a handful of councils recorded none at all in the latest year. That may mean fewer illegal sales, or simply fewer people bothering to report them, and the data can't tell us which. What it does show is thousands of people taking the trouble to flag a problem, to a service with nowhere near enough officers to follow each one up.
That isn't a criticism of the officers doing the work. What's missing is a minimum. Food businesses must be inspected at least once every three years. No law sets how often a shop selling nicotine should be checked.
At current rates, it would take around 11 years for Trading Standards to test every shop that sells vapes once.
Every new rule lands on the same desk
Between June 2025 and June 2027, the system will have been asked to take on all of the following:
oJune 2025: the single-use vape ban, which overnight made a product sold almost everywhere something to enforce against
o29th April 2026: the Tobacco and Vapes Act received Royal Assent, giving ministers the power to introduce a retail licensing scheme and to regulate flavours, packaging and display, with the details still to come
o1st October 2026: Vaping Products Duty and the duty stamps scheme came into force
o2nd October 2026: the consultation on vape packaging, appearance and display closed
o29th October 2026: age of sale rules extended to all vaping and nicotine products, and free samples and substantial discounts were banned
o1st April 2027: every vape sold in the UK must carry a valid duty stamp
o1st June 2027: the ban on vape advertising and sponsorship comes into force
Taken one at a time, each of these makes sense. Taken together, they make up a heavy workload for a service that has been cut by more than a third.
Why stricter vape rules can grow the black market
There is a less obvious problem too. Every new restriction makes the legal product a little more expensive, a little more restricted and a little less appealing, while the illegal product stays as it is. Duty is a good example. A legal 10ml e-liquid now carries £2.20 in duty before VAT. An illegal one carries nothing, because the people selling it don't pay.
When the legal market keeps getting more expensive and enforcement doesn't keep up, the gap between the two grows. Illegal sellers fill it.
Warnings from abroad
Australia's pharmacy-only vape rules
If anyone wants to see where this road leads, Australia has spent the past few years walking it.
Since October 2024, vapes can only be sold legally in pharmacies, in plain packaging, in mint, menthol or tobacco flavours, and in most of the country only after a conversation with the pharmacist. Tobacconists and convenience stores can't sell any vapes at all.
On paper, that is one of the strictest regimes in the world. In practice, an estimated 95% of vapes in Australia are illegal, in a market worth around A$1.6 billion. Across tobacco, vapes, pouches and other nicotine products, the black market's share of consumption has reached 80%.
The consequences have gone well beyond lost tax. More than 200 tobacconists have been firebombed. Only one in five penalties issued to illicit retailers is ever paid, partly because some of the people at the top of the trade live overseas, out of reach of Australian courts. In October, a post office manager north of Sydney was among three people charged over the alleged importation of illicit tobacco and vapes, with detectives describing the trade as a lucrative revenue stream for organised crime. Criminal gangs are now counterfeiting Australia's own plain packaging to pass off illegal cigarettes.
None of this is news to Canberra. Back in 2023, Australia's health minister described the old prescription system as "a ban with no real enforcement". The response was more regulation. The enforcement problem stayed, and grew.
Not everyone reads Australia the same way. Some public health academics argue the black market was fuelled by loopholes and weak policing rather than by regulation itself. Even on that reading, the missing ingredient is the same one: enforcement.
Flavour bans in the Netherlands and Ireland
Australia isn't the only warning, and it isn't the closest. The Netherlands banned flavoured vapes in January 2024. Two years on, a Dutch health ministry study found almost nine in ten vapers were using products that are illegal or bought through illegal channels. Inspectors seized nearly 220,000 illegal flavoured vapes in a single week in May, and a TV investigation found 244 shops still selling them despite repeated fines. One shopkeeper, fined for the fourteenth time, told inspectors it was "worth it".
Ireland is about to find out for itself. Its disposables ban takes full effect in January 2027, and a flavour ban covering menthol was signed into law in October. Even now, Ireland's tax authority can only seize untaxed nicotine vapes once the health service has issued a prohibition order.
What history says about prohibition
History has seen this before. When South Africa banned cigarette sales during the 2020 lockdown, researchers at the University of Cape Town found that 90% of the smokers they surveyed kept buying anyway, paying around 53% more, from street vendors, house shops and WhatsApp groups. Bhutan banned tobacco sales in 2010, then reversed the ban in 2020 after a decade of smuggling from India. Mexico has gone further than anyone on vapes, writing a ban into its constitution, and the illicit trade there is now described as a major source of cartel financing. Even America's alcohol Prohibition, which did cut drinking, is remembered mostly for the organised crime it created.
The UK is not any of these places. Vaping here is still recognised as a route away from smoking, and adults can buy legal products from specialist retailers. But our own customers have already told us how thin the line can be. In our September survey of more than 4,000 adult vapers, almost one in three said restricting flavour descriptions would make them willing to look at, or switch to, overseas or unregulated sellers.
Without enforcement, regulation can grow the very market it was meant to shrink.
From Australia to the Netherlands, strict vape bans without enforcement have handed the market to illegal sellers.
The missing piece
In law, the fix for much of this already exists. The Tobacco and Vapes Act gives ministers the power to license every shop that sells vapes, and to suspend or revoke those licences. In practice, the government now plans to consult on the scheme in 2027, as it is still working through evidence gathered in late 2025.
So in the space of two days, the new duty went live and the consultation on packaging and display closed. The scheme that would make any of it enforceable hasn't yet reached consultation.
Gaps in the vape licensing plans
Distributors are missing too. Peers proposed licensing wholesalers and distributors while the Act was in the Lords, but the idea wasn't adopted. Illegal stock doesn't arrive in shops by itself, and a duty stamp is easier to dodge when nobody further up the supply chain needs a licence.
Then there's the question of who does what. HMRC runs the duty. Trading Standards carries the main legal duty to enforce the Tobacco and Vapes Act. When the stamp regulations were debated in April, MPs asked whether Trading Standards would be able to seize products and issue penalties directly, rather than going through HMRC.
The real test comes on 1st April 2027, when unstamped stock can no longer be sold. If licensing is still at the consultation stage by then, the same stretched teams will be policing the stamps with the same tools they have now.
89% of Vape UK customers support licences for vape retailers that can be taken away from those who break the law.
Who pays when enforcement falls short?
When enforcement can't keep up, it isn't the illegal sellers who suffer. Two other groups end up paying.
Compliant vape retailers
Specialist shops that check ID, register their products and pay their duty are now competing with sellers who do none of those things. Under the new stamp penalties, a legitimate business found with fewer than 100 unstamped products faces a £2,500 penalty for a first offence. That's the right approach, but only if the shops that never planned to comply are also the ones being caught. Selling a vape to a child, by comparison, now carries an on-the-spot fine of up to £200, falling to £100 if paid within 14 days.
Put those side by side. A legitimate shop that slips up on paperwork faces £2,500. A shop that sells a vape to a child can settle it for £100. Officers can still prosecute the worst cases, but the everyday penalty for selling to a child is now a fraction of the penalty for a missing stamp. We'd genuinely like to know the thinking.
Rules mostly bind the people who already follow them. Sellers who already ignore the age of sale are unlikely to be reading the new guidance on samples and discounts. And from April 2027, specialist shops in England will also lose business rates relief, while the convenience stores selling the same products keep theirs.
Adult vapers
Many of our customers are former smokers. They're the ones paying the duty, adjusting to the new rules and, as we've written before, trying to make sense of a public conversation that increasingly treats them as part of the problem. A legal market that costs more and offers less, next to an illegal market that keeps going unchecked, isn't a good deal for them.
There's also a reputational cost. When illegal sellers and responsible specialists both get called "vape shops", the phrase stops telling anyone anything useful. Poor enforcement allows the worst operators to set the reputation for everyone.
What good enforcement would look like
We aren't calling for fewer rules. We've said it before: protecting young people, tackling illegal products and supporting adult smokers are not competing objectives. What we're asking for is for the rules we already have to actually be enforced.
In practice, that means:
oFunding that matches the workload. If the duty raises money from legal vapes, a fair share of that money should pay for removing illegal ones.
oA licensing scheme with a start date. The power already exists. It needs a timetable, it should cover distributors as well as shops, and its powers have to be used against repeat offenders, not just held in reserve.
oA minimum number of checks. Food businesses have a legal inspection cycle. Shops selling nicotine should too, and a run of underage complaints about the same shop should be enough to bring a visit forward.
oStamps that customers can check. Digital duty stamps will let products be traced and checked for authenticity. That will only help if the public knows what to look for and can check it easily.
oEnforcement aimed at sellers, not paperwork. The biggest risk lies with sellers who were never going to comply, not with compliant shops that make an administrative slip.
Conclusion
The UK now has a detailed set of vaping rules, and some of it is sensible. But regulation without enforcement only puts rules on the people who were already following them. Australia and the Netherlands have shown where that ends: strict rules on paper, and a market run by people who ignore all of them.
The shocking part isn't how many illegal vapes are being seized. It's how many probably aren't.