Trading standards capacity, reviewed against the offences it is about to inherit

We have already reviewed a bottle-size limit on these pages, so a regime is not much of a stretch. This one is the enforcement machinery that decides whether the rest of the rulebook means anything inside a shop. From late October it acquires new offences, and it is worth assessing on the same terms as a product.

What is arriving, and when

Per the Department of Health and Social Care’s guidance on fixed penalty notices for tobacco, vaping and nicotine products, trading standards becomes the issuing authority in England, Wales and Scotland — local councils in Northern Ireland — for a regime starting on 29 October 2026 and extended on 1 January 2027.

What the design gets right

The offences are drawn where the behaviour is. Under-age sale and proxy purchase are the staples. Giveaways and substantial discounts move the regime onto conduct visible from the pavement — a free sample table, a multibuy sign — which an officer can assess without a test purchase.

A fixed penalty is a proportionate instrument. The alternative to a ticket is a prosecution file: slow, resource-hungry and reserved for the worst cases, which leaves a wide middle band of non-compliance unaddressed. A notice issued on the day changes that arithmetic, and it is the regime’s strongest feature.

The two waves are sequenced sensibly. October takes offences that resemble existing duties; January adds the generational provision and signage, which require retailers to change process rather than merely stop doing something. Giving the harder change the later date is right.

It arrives alongside a separate documentary check. From 1 October 2026, HMRC’s guidance for businesses handling vaping products requires liable products released onto the UK market to carry a vaping duty stamp. A tax measure, not a trading standards one — but it hands an officer a check that can be made on sight.

Where it is weak

The base it lands on looks thinner than it was. Ecigclick, reporting the retailer Vape Club’s 2026 Illegal Vapes and Nicotine Product Report, states that trading standards carried out 8,881 inspections involving vaping, tobacco and nicotine products in 2025, down 5.8 per cent from 9,431 in 2024, and that only 1.5 per cent of inspections resulted in a fine. Those are industry figures from a retailer with a commercial interest in the legal market, drawn on Ecigclick’s account from freedom-of-information responses covering 120 local authorities — a stated method, though we could not obtain the report to check it. We use them for want of any other. Read as a direction rather than a measurement, they point the wrong way: more offences to enforce, fewer visits in which to enforce them.

The illicit-market figure circulating alongside them is not a measurement. The same reporting puts it at roughly £300 million a year, attributing that estimate to Dan Marchant, a director of Vape Club, rather than to any calculation published in the report. No working has been published, and it should not be quoted as fact — including by us.

A ticketing power does not create officer time. It cuts the cost per enforcement action; it does nothing about how many a service can start. If the inspection base is flat or falling, a cheaper penalty produces more penalties per visit, not more visits.

Devolution makes compliance advice harder to give than it should be. Northern Ireland runs the same regime on three commencement dates rather than two, and there the notices come from local councils, not trading standards, per the same DHSC guidance. A UK-wide retailer cannot read one page and be done.

Fixed penalties suit fixed businesses. Notices are served on identifiable premises. The supply that most concerns the trade — imported, unstamped, sold from shops that open and close — is where a ticket is least suitable. Enforcement of the single-use prohibition has shown that pattern.

Pros and cons

Verdict

Our assessment is that the design deserves more credit than it will get, and the resourcing more scrutiny than it has had. The doubt is entirely on the input side.

For retailers the practical reading is simple: from 29 October the promotional conduct that has been a grey area — the giveaway, the aggressive multibuy — becomes ticketable, decided by what is on display when someone walks in.

Whatever the regime does or fails to do, it sits over products that contain nicotine, which is addictive. UK sale of them is restricted to over-18s, and this desk writes for adults already using nicotine and for smokers weighing a move away from cigarettes — not for anyone else.