Ministers have been told that a plan to ban the sale of disposable vapes by next summer could lead to some users “reverting or relapsing” back to cigarette smoking.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said vape usage in England had grown by more than 400% between 2012 and 2023, with 9.1% of the public buying and using the products.
Legislation set to be introduced to parliament this year will ban the sale of single-use vapes in England, in part to limit the environmental damage they cause.
However, an impact assessment by Defra revealed that “29% of current [people who vape] will either revert/relapse to smoking tobacco” as a result of the ban. Officials said “if the ban is increasing use of cigarettes there could be health disbenefits”.
The report added: “We have assumed that most users of disposable vapes will switch to reusable vapes, however there will be a proportion of users that may revert back to smoking tobacco or quit vaping and smoking altogether.”
The legislation had been tabled under Rishi Sunak’s premiership, but the government ran out of time in the last parliament.
The tobacco and vapes bill would prevent anyone born from 2009 from legally smoking by gradually raising the age at which tobacco can be bought. It also aims to impose restrictions on the sale and marketing of vapes to children.
The health secretary, Wes Streeting, said this month he planned to introduce the bill “before Christmas”.
The Labour MP Mary Glindon criticised the chancellor’s tax increase on vape liquid during the budget debate, saying it could discourage people from quitting smoking.
Glindon, the MP for Newcastle upon Tyne East and Wallsend, said the increase, to take place in October 2026, was “unsustainably high” and would “hurt working people” who used vapes.
In the budget, Rachel Reeves also set out increases of 2% on tobacco and 10% for hand-rolled tobacco. It followed a study that suggested about 1 million adults in England now vaped despite never being regular smokers.
The research published in Lancet Public Health looked at survey data collected between 2016 and 2024 from 153,073 adults in England, of whom 94,107 had never regularly smoked tobacco.
Before 2021, the proportion of never-regular-smokers who vaped in England was low, at an average of 0.5% between 2016 and 2020. This increased to 3.5% by April 2024, equating to about 1 million vapers. Among these, more than half – an estimated 588,000 – were aged between 18 and 24, the study found.
A separate study led by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) indicated that banning the sale of tobacco to people born between 2006 and 2010 could prevent 1.2 million lung cancer deaths by 2095.
It has been estimated that almost 5m single-use vapes were either littered or thrown away in general waste every week in the UK – almost four times as much as the previous year.
A government spokesperson said: “Our changes will protect a whole generation of children from being drawn in to the dangers of smoking and nicotine addiction. A quarter of 11- to 15-year-olds used a vape last year and overall the number of children using them has tripled in the past three years. Our tobacco and vapes bill will pave the way for a smoke-free UK – helping future generations live well for longer and ease the strain on our NHS.”
