My Honest Opinion: The Vape Tax, the Consultation, and the Industry I Have Been In Since 2014

Everything else we have published about the new vape laws has been deliberately factual, and it will stay that way. This piece is the exception: it is my opinion, and I want to be upfront about who it comes from.

I have been in this industry since 2014, I vape, I own this shop and it feeds my family, so weigh what follows with all of that in mind. Ecigone filed its response to the government consultation before the 2 October deadline, and this is the longer version of what I told them.

The tax gets it backwards, and the government's own first draft proves it

I do not agree with the vape tax, and one table tells you everything about what it really is. When the duty was first designed in early 2024 it was tiered by nicotine strength. The final version, the one arriving on 1 October, is not.

The first draft pointed somewhere. It made stepping your nicotine down cheaper at every stage, which is exactly what you would build if a smoke-free generation were truly the goal.

Now, I will be fair about two things before I make my point, because they are the arguments that come back whenever this is raised. The same Budget that confirmed the flat rate also put tobacco duty up by an equivalent £2.20 at the same moment, deliberately, so that vaping stays cheaper than smoking - and that gap genuinely matters. And there were health voices who disliked the tiered version too, arguing that taxing the strongest liquids hardest punishes the heavy smokers who need high strength to switch in the first place.

Both of those are fair points. Neither of them explains the bit I cannot get past: the final version taxes a bottle with zero nicotine in it at exactly the same rate as a bottle at the 20mg legal maximum. Whatever side of the tiering argument you take, there is no health logic anywhere that lands on taxing the liquid with no nicotine at all, at the full rate.

And the model gets worse the closer you look, because whoever built it seems to think vapers use liquid the way smokers use cigarettes. They do not. Liquid consumption varies enormously between setups, and it runs in the opposite direction to nicotine. A pod vaper on 20mg salts might get through 2ml a day and pay around 44p in duty. A sub-ohm vaper on 3mg shortfill can get through 15ml a day and pay £3.30, before the VAT charged on top of the duty. That is more than seven times the tax for a small fraction of the nicotine. A duty that is supposedly about nicotine harm charges the least nicotine-dependent vapers in the country the most money, every single day. The averages they modelled hide that completely.

That is not public health policy. That is a sin tax on the thing that gets people off the actual sin, and it lands on every format there is, from 10ml nic salts to 100ml shortfills. Our vape tax guide shows exactly what it adds to every bottle you buy.

The tax will leak, and everyone in the trade already knows how

Here is the part the Treasury's model really did not think through. The duty applies to liquid sold for vaping, and as drafted that reaches the ingredients too: PG, VG and flavour concentrates all carry the duty when a vape business sells them for vaping. The identical products, food grade, in different packaging from a general retailer, carry no duty at all. Same substances, same purity, same bottles in some cases. The only difference is the label and who sold it.

I know my customers, genuinely, some of them for over a decade. The vaper running a 30mm RDA through 30ml of liquid a day is looking at nearly £8 a day in duty alone from October, £240 a month, on top of the price of the liquid itself. That person is not going to pay it, and they are not going to stop vaping either. They will mix their own from untaxed ingredients. And here is the detail that shows how unserious the design is: technically, the rules say a home mixer becomes their own producer, expected to report what they make to HMRC and pay the duty on it themselves. Every single person in this industry knows exactly how much of that is going to happen. A tax that depends on hobbyists in their kitchens filing duty returns is not a tax, it is an honesty box, and the revenue forecast quietly assumes the box stays full. Consumers always find the cheapest way to keep doing the thing they enjoy. It is the whole reason there is still a black market in disposables a year after the ban.

So the duty will not do much to change how much people vape. What it changes is where the liquid comes from: away from tested, notified, vape-specific supply and into generic channels the vaping rules never touch. For a tax sold on health grounds, pushing liquid out of the regulated supply chain is quite the outcome.

And to be completely clear about where we stand while all this plays out: Ecigone stays compliant to the letter, as we always have. We will serve the mixer with the hardware, the convenience customer with prefilled pods and nic salts at the best prices we can hold, and everything in between, all of it legal and above board. But do not confuse our compliance with a belief that this design will work. It will not, and in two years the receipts will show it.

Where the consultation is right

I want to be fair, because some of what is proposed is right and I said so in our response. All of this should happen, and none of it will be missed:

• Devices dressed up as toys and gadgets to catch a fifteen-year-old's eye - gone, good.
• Packs styled like sweets - gone, good.
• Child-resistant packaging, honest labelling, clear age symbols - yes, tomorrow.
• An end to the worst of what flooded in during the disposable boom from factories that never cared about UK rules in the first place.

Where it loses the plot

There is a difference between stripping the toy features out of vapes and stripping the features out. We sell a lot of high-end and rebuildable equipment across our vape kits and tanks ranges to adult vapers who use it as a quitting tool and a genuine hobby, and those devices need their screens, settings and information to do their job.

The current drafts at least keep battery readouts and puff counters, which is sensible, but the direction of travel worries me. We do not make adults drink alcohol out of a plain square glass to protect children from wine. We police who gets served. The same principle should apply here.

And on packaging, one comparison I think about a lot:

Two things can be true at once. Some vape packaging went too far and needs reining in. And the priorities in that table are completely upside down.

How we got here, honestly

People forget this industry was already regulated long before any of the current proposals. Since the TPD we have had:

• A 20mg nicotine cap on every liquid sold.
• 10ml bottle limits on nicotine-containing e-liquid and 2ml tank limits on devices.
• Notification and testing of every product before it can legally go on sale.

And the look of the industry was plain enough for years. The loud colours arrived with the disposable boom, and the disposable boom is what put vapes in the hands of kids and this industry on the front pages. I wrote about that in our piece on the UK's illegal vape epidemic, and my view has not changed: the surge, the colours and the youth problem were a disposables problem, and the whole industry is now paying for a category most of us spent years refusing to celebrate.

Here is the uncomfortable bit the consultation does not really face. The rules we already had were not enforced. You can still walk into certain corner shops today and buy an illegal big-tank disposable that ignores every UK limit. Nicotine base far stronger than anything the TPD allows is still a one-search job online. None of the new proposals fix that, because the problem was never the absence of rules; it was the absence of policing.

Germany went through its own adjustment and its compliant industry carried on, and ours will adjust too. But if enforcement had been real from the beginning, half of what is now being proposed would never have been thought necessary.

The law I would actually prioritise

If the government asked me for one policy, it would not be a colour scheme. It would be retailer licensing, backed by the notification and testing regime we already have, with real teeth.

And here is the thing, said with credit where it is due: the Tobacco and Vapes Act already contains the powers for exactly this. A mandatory licensing scheme for every retailer of tobacco, vapes and nicotine products, personal licences and premises licences both, is sitting in the Act right now. What is missing is a date. The licensing powers wait on consultations and secondary legislation with no timetable attached, while the packaging consultation runs right on schedule. The order is backwards. Licensing done properly means:

• Every business selling nicotine is licensed, online and on the high street.
• The licence is conditional on selling only notified, tested, compliant product.
• Anyone caught selling illegal stock loses the licence, first strike.
• Trading Standards get the register, so any officer can check any shop in seconds.
• And the fee priced so a small independent shop can carry it as easily as a business our size. The licence is there to filter out the rogue sellers, not the small honest ones - if the cost of the licence is what closes a compliant independent, the scheme has failed at its own job.

Do that first, and every shop like ours that has spent years doing this properly finally gets what compliance is supposed to buy: a market where the rules are the same for everyone. Squeeze the cowboys out of existence and you protect children better than any white box ever will. The tool is already on the statute book. Use it before the paint chart.

Where I land

I am a vaper and a business owner, so of course I push back when my industry gets squeezed; you can discount my opinion accordingly and I will not complain. The tax is coming on 1 October whether I agree with it or not, the stamps follow in 2027, and some version of the packaging rules will likely follow after that.

The industry will take the hits, adjust, and carry on, because it always has, and because the thing underneath it is still true: for the millions of adults who smoke, vaping remains the most effective way off cigarettes this country has ever had.

And when I argue for this industry, I mean all of it, not just us. The small independents, the UK liquid makers, the one-person shops that got their towns off cigarettes long before anyone else would touch a vape. Every compliant business in this trade deserves rules it can survive, and I would rather share a fair market with every one of them than inherit an unfair one on my own.

Ecigone will be here through all of it. We will keep selling the broad range that serves both the hobbyist who loves this and the ex-smoker who just wants a simple pod kit that works, we will keep every kit and e-liquid we sell legal, notified and tested, and we will keep telling you the truth about every rule as it lands, including the ones we do not like. That is the whole deal, and it does not change.

More vaping guides

• Vape plain packaging: what the government actually proposes
• The vape flavour ban: what is actually changing and what is not
• The vape display ban explained
• Vape duty stamps: the April 2027 crackdown
• The UK vape tax 2026 guide

Vaping is substantially less harmful than smoking but it is not risk-free, and it is intended for adult smokers and existing vapers. If you do not smoke, do not vape. For free support quitting smoking altogether, visit the NHS stop smoking services.