Nicotine nonsense

Dr Christopher Snowdon is the Head of Lifestyle Economics at the IEA

It is not unheard of for politicians to say one thing and do another, but you would hope that a government that has made it its mission to banish “dodgy vape shops” and clean up the high street would be doing all it can to support legitimate retailers.

Instead, it is quietly planning to burden them with yet more regulation which, by its own admission, will cost them hundreds of millions of pounds. The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) is currently running a public consultation on a slew of anti-vaping policies and has been conducting a cost-benefit analysis of them. As with most public consultations, it feels like a sham. The government seems to have made its mind up, evidence has nothing to do with it, and it doesn’t matter that the Impact Assessments are all costs and no benefits.

One of DHSC’s brainwaves is forcing vapes, heated tobacco and nicotine pouches to be put behind shutters in shops. We already do this with cigarettes and it annoys customers and shopkeepers alike by unnecessarily increasing transaction times. To free up space, many small shops now stock tobacco under the counter, which suits those who sell black market products because “under the counter” is pretty much in their job description.

There are dozens of brands of cigarettes but there are hundreds of brands of vape juice. They may all soon have to be hidden out of sight and, to add to the confusion, the government intends to put them in plain packaging at the same time, with “minimal branding differentiation”. The corner shops of the future will be inconvenience stores.

The costs of the display ban alone will be substantial. According to the Impact Assessment, it will cost £2.2 million to familiarise staff with the new law, £22.6 million to print and update price lists and £27.6 million to buy the appropriate drawer units and display cabinets. Longer transaction times are expected to add costs of £43.1 million and the extra time it will take to assess and replace stock will add a further £185.1 million. Once you include the lost profits that DHSC expects to result from the policy, there are £872.5 million of costs, mostly to independent retailers and specialist vape shops.

All this to implement a ban that didn’t work when they tried it with tobacco and which would be bad for public health if it “worked” for vapes and pouches. The Impact Assessment predicts that the display ban will reduce the adult vaping rate from 8.36 per cent in 2027 to 7.8 per cent in 2029 and will reduce the prevalence of heated tobacco use from 0.295 per cent to 0.267 per cent over the same period. The spurious accuracy of Impact Assessments is on full display in the second of these estimates; the numbers are tiny and the authors have no idea what drives them. But even if they are right to assume that banning the retail display of these products will reduce the number of users, the overwhelming likelihood is that many of them will go back to smoking. They reckon that the number of nicotine pouch users will fall from 1 per cent to 0.933 per cent (!) under a display ban, but nicotine pouches are about as safe as you can get and the vast majority of their users are former or current smokers. Does the government really believe that these people will abstain from more dangerous nicotine products for the rest of their lives if a display ban somehow puts them off pouches?

The Impact Assessment briefly admits that one of the “unintended consequences” of the ban is that it “could shift harm perceptions of vaping products, leading to individuals switching or trying more harmful products”. That is one of the big risks with regulating everything like cigarettes, but the authors quickly cast such concerns aside in favour of calculating how much the NHS could save if fewer people vaped. They do so on the ridiculous assumption that vaping carries 20 per cent of the risks of smoking, based on a Canadian report from 2017 that has never been published and was produced by five unnamed “academics in tobacco control”. Britain has its own experts in e-cigarette science and they have repeatedly said, based on published evidence, that the risks are unlikely to exceed 5 per cent and are probably much lower.

The display ban is just one of a number of anti-vaping policies the government is threatening to introduce thanks to the Sunak-Streeting School of Virtue Signalling. Plain packaging for vape juice will cost the country £641.1 million, according to the government’s Impact Assessment. Extending the smoking ban to e-cigarettes will cost another £531.8 million. Forcing manufacturers to only produce vapes that are an “opaque matt achromatic colour (black, white, grey) with no variation in shades” is going to cost £330.9 million. As with the display ban, the Impact Assessments for these policies do not include any figure showing the monetised (or non-monetised) benefits. In the case of the display ban, the authors make the pathetic admission that they can’t be sure that there will be any benefits because they don’t know what the risks of the products in question are. The authors of the vaping ban Impact Assessment admitted that they couldn’t put a figure on the benefits because they didn’t know whether secondhand vaping is dangerous (it isn’t) or what the consequences of the policy will be.

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The government is blundering into policies that will cost a fortune, reduce productivity, stimulate the black market and very likely damage public health. It is going in blind, with virtually no evidence to support its ideas and with DHSC unable to show that there will be any benefits to outweigh the costs. The authors of the Impact Assessment looking at “opaque matt achromatic colours” were working with so little evidence that I almost felt sorry for them, but they were at least being honest when they said that they could not monetise benefits because they were unsure whether there will be any. If policy-making were evidence-based, that would have been the end of it. The policy would never have got past the Impact Assessment stage. But this is the arena of “public health” policy-making where the only evidence that interests the government is what people are chatting on Mumsnet and what the latest YouGov poll says.

This article first appeared in The Critic