Shops across Scotland fined for selling vapes to underage youth

It comes amid warnings that some children are travelling an hour on the bus to shops where they know “no questions will be asked”.

A series of Freedom of Information Requests to Scotland’s local authorities showed that at least 91 shops had failed a Trading Standard exercise over the sale of vapes to youth in 2022.

This was up from just seven across the country in 2021, with only four additional councils stating that investigations remained paused due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Up until May this year, at least 39 retailers were caught selling vapes to minors without challenging their age.

Many retailers were only issued warning letters but a total of 46 fixed penalty notices were also issued in 2022. The number of fines up until May this year has already climbed to 41.  

However, some local authorities have not carried out any proactive test purchasing of at all since 2021.

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Dumfries and Galloway, East Lothian Council, Inverclyde confirmed that they had not carried out any test purchases in regard to vapes being sold to underage Scots over the three-year period.

East Ayrshire, Orkney, Shetland Islands and the Western Isles did not record any failures of the test purchases over the past three years.

Fife Council failed to respond to the Freedom of Information request by the time of publication.

Health professionals, environmental and youth advocacy groups have issued multiple pleas to tackle the growing use of disposable vapes.

Children themselves have also written Scottish Government ministers about their concerns about vapes and e-cigarettes being “deliberately marketed towards” youth.

Changing Our World (CoW), an advisory group made up of children and young people aged between nine and 25, has been promised an in-person meeting with Jenni Minto after the school holidays following the letter.

As well as the marketing including “sweetie shops selling vapes”, the youth group has voiced fears over the health repercussions, few schools tackling the topic, the impact on the environment with the disposable product being littered on the streets.

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Elaine Kerridge, policy manager at Children in Scotland, said: "They are displayed beside sweets and look like sweets and have the same flavours and names as sweets.

“That’s one thing our young people want to be changed but it is also where it's sold and how it is sold.”

Only seven councils were able to supply figures on the number of vapes which had been confiscated on school premises, but even these areas had schools which did not record the confiscations.

Secondary schools in Stirling saw a 571% increase in confiscations from 14 in 2019 to 94 taken in 2023 up to May.

In Aberdeen, 26 vapes were confiscated in primary schools alone in 2021/22 with a further 20 already taken in 2022/23.

Meanwhile, Orkney’s secondary schools only saw two vapes confiscated on record in 2021/22 which rose to 21 in 2022/23.

Fast Forward, a national organisation dedicated to the prevention and early intervention of risk-taking behaviours, provided its first educational session on vaping ahead of the first Covid-19 lockdown.

After the lockdowns, it was able to restart this harm-reduction approach in 2021 but the number of requests “really picked up” last year, project officer Laura Alexander said.

These requests coming from both secondary and primary schools have also included calls for Fast Forward to hold educational sessions about the harms of vapes in classes as young as P4.

While the sessions for alcohol would use generic information and would avoid naming brands, Ms Alexander has found that children already knew detailed information about vaping products.

She said: “The young people are telling us the makes, the brands, the flavours so we have started to adapt our sessions to suit what the young people were telling us.

“They were telling us all this because of what they were seeing in their communities and where they were seeing it.”  

Often in bright packaging and with flavours ranging from cotton candy to strawberry, the single-use vapes, which were first marketed as a smoking cessation tool, are “clearly marketed” to young people, Ms Kerridge said.

The pandemic has also had a significant impact on the ability to carry out education and prevention services and Ms Alexander said they are “still to this day catching up”.  

She added: “These young people when we go in to work with them, they have more knowledge and more awareness of e-cigarettes and vapes than what they do about tobacco cigarettes.”

It is vital that the preventative information about tobacco is not lost, so that young people do not transition from vapes to cigarettes, she explained.

Fast Forward chief executive Allie Cherry-Byrnes added: “There are young people who are moving from vaping to smoking tobacco so it is introducing people to it.”

But she said the danger of vapes is not just contained to the inhalation of nicotine-filled liquids.

“Certainly, the information that Laura has shared and the conversations she has been having with young people is that they know the shops they can go to.

“There are young people travelling an hour on the bus from East Lothian to Edinburgh because they know the shops where there will be no questions asked.

“They have also worked out how to recharge supposedly single-use disposable vapes and other liquids.”

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However, disposable vapes use lithium batteries and could result in fires that are “almost impossible to put out”.

She said: “So if you are a young person thinking I am going to crack this open to work out how to doctor it are you also potentially damaging the battery, potentially putting yourself at risk.”

While a ban on the disposable versions of the product may be imminent, the chief executive said: “It’s not going anywhere.

“Even the banning of disposable vapes will take a number of years because it has to go through parliament and put into place.”

Ms Alexander added: “If the legislation surrounding vapes were brought in line with tobacco cigarettes then a lot of the concerns that people have got might no longer be there but we still need the education, the prevention, we still need to make sure youth are aware of the rights the wrongs.”