In July 2024, Prime Minister Keir Starmer promised that his government would “tread more lightly on your lives.” It was a reassuring sentiment recognising that not every social concern requires a new rule, not every risk demands a ban, and not every headline justifies state intervention.
Yet what has followed has been an avalanche of nanny-state micromanagement often with little scientific justification. The recent absurd proposal to ban vaping in public places is a perfect example.
Ministers argue that vaping should be prohibited indoors, just like smoking, to protect bystanders from exposure to nicotine and “potential toxicants.” But this claim directly contradicts years of government-commissioned scientific advice—that taxpayers have had to pay for—to guide policymaking.
In 2015, Public Health England concluded that e-cigarette use releases negligible levels of nicotine into ambient air, with no identified health risks to bystanders. Its 2018 update reaffirmed that passive exposure posed no identified risk. These were not industry reports; they were official, taxpayer-funded evidence reviews.
In 2022, the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities published a comprehensive 1,468-page review which was no doubt costly to the taxpayers who funded it. It found that vaping products produce little or no side-stream emissions compared with cigarettes, and that acute second-hand exposure does not result in detectable levels of nicotine or toxicant biomarkers in non-users. Across all outcomes, the report found insufficient evidence of material harm to justify prohibition.
The government’s own independent review led by Javed Khan in 2022 urged ministers to embrace vaping as a central tool in making smoking obsolete. He acknowledged that while vaping is not risk-free, the alternative of continuing to smoke is far worse. Treating vaping identically to smoking goes directly against Khan’s taxpayer-funded advice.
These reviews were commissioned to inform policy. If ministers are now prepared to disregard them, taxpayers have seen their money wasted.
This is nothing but performative lawmaking. Once a government embraces the mindset that legislation is the primary solution to any concern, it begins to treat new laws as proof of seriousness. Smoking was banned indoors because ministers considered second-hand smoke a scientifically proven harm. There is no equivalent body of evidence for second-hand vaping.
Extending smoke-free laws to vaping in the absence of comparable risk is regulation for regulation’s sake and devoid of any scientific reasoning. This is damaging because, when government makes laws on such a flimsy basis, it erodes public trust in proportionate policymaking.
Public understanding of the massive reduction in harm of vaping compared with smoking is already astonishingly poor. When the law treats both behaviours identically, it reinforces the mistaken belief that switching offers no health advantage. Many smokers will conclude there is little point in moving away from cigarettes.
The Royal College of Physicians warned in 2016 that over-cautious regulation which makes e-cigarettes less accessible or acceptable “causes harm by perpetuating smoking.” A public vaping ban risks doing precisely that by eroding the practical and symbolic benefits of switching and perpetuating combustible tobacco use, still one of the UK’s leading causes of preventable death.
As a further illustration of how incoherent this proposal is, the government’s successful “Swap to Stop” programme actively provides free vaping products through stop-smoking services. Yet while one arm of government promotes substitution, the idea of then banning vaping in all places where smoking is banned tells smokers they may as well carry on as they are.
More than five million adults in the UK vape, most of them former smokers. A blanket ban would suggest their efforts to reduce harm are indistinguishable from continuing to smoke. It would override business discretion, restrict adult behaviour, and do so without evidence of measurable harm to others.
When Prime Minister Starmer pledged to tread lightly on the public’s lives, he implicitly acknowledged that state power should be exercised sparingly and proportionately. Laws that intrude into everyday life must be justified by clear evidence of harm. In this case, that threshold has not been even remotely met. Yet, the government has opened a public consultation on imposing this draconian nanny state law which closes on May 8th.
Banning vaping in public places will not protect bystanders from any danger. But what it will certainly do is discourage switching, entrench smoking, and demonstrate that the urge to tread on the public is more attractive to politicians than scientific reasoning.
If government is serious about reducing disease and death, it should respect the expert advice it has commissioned, and that taxpayers have funded, rather than regulate in defiance of it. Otherwise, “treading lightly” is nothing more than a campaign slogan, and Starmer just another politician who mistakenly believes creating unnecessary laws is the same as governing the country wisely.
You can access the government consultation and submit a response at this page.
Banning Vaping in Public Places Is Disproportionate, Unscientific and a Waste of Taxes
