Swansea Council‘s Labour cabinet is calling on the Plaid Cymru-run Welsh Government to give Welsh councils the same power to block vape shops and barbers that Labour’s Westminster government has just handed to councils in England.
At the moment a barber, a vape shop and a nail bar all count as ordinary shops under Welsh planning rules, so one can replace another on any Swansea street with no permission at all, and the council cannot refuse.
A motion to Thursday’s full council, signed by council leader Rob Stewart, Cllr Andrea Harrington and nine other Labour councillors, asks the leader and chief executive to write to Welsh ministers demanding reform of the A1 and A3 planning use classes so councils can manage “clustering”.
The motion says the rules have left “too many” units in “persistent vacancy, decline, or an unmanaged proliferation of single-type outlets”. It names “vape shops, barbers and repetitive low-footfall uses” as the problem, and says residents and business owners “consistently express frustration at the lack of local influence over high street changes”.
The councillors want the use classes rewritten so councils “can explicitly manage the clustering of vape shops, barbers, and nail and beauty bars without regulatory loopholes”. They also call for “a proactive, zero-tolerance approach to dereliction, anti-social behaviour, and illicit trading”.
Decisions about “the character, vitality, and retail balance of our town centres are best made locally by the people and the council who know the area”, the motion says, “rather than through blanket national permitted development rights”.
The timing is not accidental. Last month Prime Minister Andy Burnham announced that vape shops in England would need planning permission, with councils able to keep them away from schools, but planning is devolved and the change stops at the border.
Asked then whether Wales would follow, a Welsh Government spokesperson said it would “consider whether similar measures are required for vape shops when we next review the planning legislation relating to use classes”.
Swansea’s motion is, in effect, a request to hold that review now.
The case against the vape shop is partly about children and partly about crime. Campaigners say around a million 11 to 17-year-olds tried vaping last year, drawn in by the sweet flavours and bright displays that the UK and Welsh governments are now moving to ban.
Swansea knows the other half of the problem better than anywhere. Trading Standards seized £470,000 of illegal vapes from the city’s shops in the year after the disposable ban, more by value than any council in the UK, and every one of the 47,200 items came from a vape shop or a convenience store.
Cllr Andrew Williams, cabinet member for development, has set out what this year has brought so far in a written answer to councillors ahead of Thursday’s full council: more than 15 vehicles seized for storing or moving illegal goods, illegal tobacco worth over £300,000 recovered, cash seized as suspected proceeds of crime, and closure orders on four more premises, on top of nine shops shut in a single three-day operation last October.
Officers now work evenings and weekends, Cllr Williams said, because sellers use “concealed storage areas, stash vehicles and off-site premises”, and some shops have moved into THC and cannabis products. Swansea’s seizure figures are the highest in Wales, he said, because of enforcement effort “rather than indicating a greater problem in Swansea than elsewhere”.
Councils have long been able to raid a shop selling illegal stock. What they cannot do is stop the next one opening in the empty unit next door, which is the gap the motion is aimed at.
The bigger worry, and the one the motion points at with its call for “zero tolerance” on “illicit trading”, is what some of these shops are for. The National Crime Agency has spent 18 months raiding barbers, vape shops and nail bars across the UK on the basis that cash businesses with few customers are being used as fronts for money laundering, illegal working and illicit tobacco.
Its Operation Machinize visited or raided more than 2,700 premises in a single month last October, made 924 arrests and seized £10.7m. The agency says around £12bn of criminal cash is generated in the UK every year, much of it from drugs, and that barbers, vape shops and nail bars are among the businesses used to wash it.
Security minister Dan Jarvis said at the time: “Criminals are using these dodgy shops as fronts for serious organised crime, money laundering and illegal working, risking the future of the British high street.”
None of that means any particular barber in Swansea is anything other than a barber. But it is why Westminster paired England’s new planning powers with a £30m crackdown on “rogue businesses”, and why Swansea’s motion asks for planning powers and enforcement in the same breath.
Mr Burnham said high streets had been “hollowed out and become unrecognisable over decades of decline”, with vape shops, betting shops and rogue operators replacing “the shops, services, and community spaces that people are crying out for”. Analysis his government cited from the Centre for Social Justice found Britain had lost nearly 1,800 pubs and bars since 2016 while vape and tobacco shops grew to almost 2,200.
The Welsh Government has said it is giving Trading Standards Wales more than £650,000 to tackle illegal vapes and tobacco, and bringing in on-the-spot fines under the Tobacco and Vapes Act.
The council has no power to act on the motion itself. If it passes, the letter goes to Cardiff Bay, and any change would need the Welsh Government to amend the Use Classes Order.
The motion is one of two from the cabinet on Thursday. The other, backed by Labour and three opposition group leaders, asks for a share of the £322m Wales received from England’s special needs write-off.
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