The brightly coloured vapes lining local shop counters could soon vanish — replaced by plain white packs, muted devices and displays hidden from view, under a UK-wide crackdown on products that hook children.
The UK and devolved governments launched a 12-week consultation on Friday, using powers in the new Tobacco and Vapes Act, proposing plain white vape packaging with strict limits on text colour, imagery and branding.
Flavour names would be cut back to simple descriptions such as “Apple” — with concept and sensory names banned, along with anything referencing sweets, desserts or alcohol. The devices themselves would come only in white, black or grey, with no cosmetic lights.
Vapes would also disappear from view in shops, restricted from display in the same way as cigarettes — with an existing display exemption removed for duty-free shops and airports.
The scale of the problem is stark: campaign group Action on Smoking and Health reports around one million 11 to 17-year-olds in Great Britain tried vaping in 2025, with colourful packaging, prominent displays and child-appealing flavours blamed for driving take-up.
Health Secretary James Murray said the evidence was clear that too many young people were experimenting with vapes, “attracted by the array of flavours, bright colours and marketing displays”.
He said vapes were less harmful than cigarettes and played an important role in helping adult smokers quit — “but they should never be designed or marketed in ways that tempt children”.
The Welsh Government’s Deputy Minister for Preventative and Public Health, Nerys Evans, said vapes were being deliberately designed and marketed to appeal to children, with bright colours, cartoon branding and sweet-sounding flavour names that had “no place in products containing addictive nicotine”.
The proposals land in a county that knows the problem well. Swansea Council’s Trading Standards team shut a Pontarddulais vape shop for a third time last month — one of two closed in June — and has vowed more raids this year.
The city recorded the fifth-largest haul of illegal vapes seized anywhere in the UK last year.
Cllr Wendy Taylor, chair of the Local Government Association’s health and wellbeing committee, said there was “no legitimate reason” for nicotine products in neon packaging with cartoon images — and that councils had long called for an end to vapes “being dressed up like sweets and sold within arm’s reach of the pick and mix”.
The consultation goes further than vapes: plain packaging and health warnings would extend to all tobacco products, including cigars and cigarette papers, with quit-support messages inside packs and heated tobacco devices restricted to the same drab brown as cigarette packets.
It follows the ban on single-use vapes last June, with more already scheduled: a new Vaping Products Duty from October, bans on vending machine sales and free distribution from 29 October, and an end to vape advertising and sponsorship from June 2027.
The move adds to a widening push to protect children that readers will recognise: under-16s will be blocked from major social media platforms by spring 2027, while Welsh classrooms face a fresh crackdown on mobile phones.
No law changes yet — regulations will follow analysis of the consultation, which runs for 12 weeks, with responses invited from the public, retailers and health groups via the UK Government’s website.
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