Sandwich shops in Britain are inspected for food hygiene more than three times as often as shops are checked for selling vapes to children.

That is the central finding of 26 Freedom of Information responses covering 21 Trading Standards services and 27 councils, obtained and published in full today by the British e-liquid manufacturer Riot Labs. Food hygiene inspection is required by law, at least once every three years for even the lowest-risk premises and far more often for anywhere handling fresh food. No law sets how often a shop must be checked for selling nicotine to a child. On these figures it happens about once every eleven years.

The responses record 2,850 underage test purchases across three years, 642 of which ended in a sale, and 6,177 reports of underage or illegal vape selling.

Riot Labs argues that the Government consultation closing on 2 October is asking the wrong question. On these figures the law that already exists is barely enforced, and no change to the colour of a packet alters that. Britain does not need further restrictions on vaping. It needs to enforce the rules it already has.

Across the authorities where the shops can be counted, a shop is test purchased roughly once every eleven years, and more than one in five of the shops officers did check sold a vape to a child. Nearly three quarters of the underage sales where the shop type was recorded happened in convenience stores and other general retail rather than in specialist vape shops. Councils received more than five reports a day about underage or illegal vape selling, and only one council in Britain could say what it did about them. The average officer conducted 2.31 test purchases a year, or one every five months, which is one test purchase for every £22,000 of Trading Standards budget. Six of the 60 service-years in the dataset recorded no underage test purchasing whatsoever.

The gap between the hardest and the softest enforcement is enormous. In Newham, the most active authority in the dataset, a shop can expect to be tested about once every three years, which is no better than the legal minimum for the lowest-risk food shop. In Kent it would take 113 years to reach every shop once. Measured per officer, the spread between the two is 286-fold.

Kent is the sharpest single example. Its Trading Standards service made 23 underage test purchases across three years, none at all in 2023/24, in a county with 865 shops that could sell a vape. It received 603 reports in the same period, which is one test purchase for every 26 reports, and could not say how many led to enforcement action. The council was not unaware of the problem: it had already spent £50,000 on a survey of 5,493 pupils that found about one in ten currently vaping, and it funds a Trading Standards underage sales programme at £108,000 a year. That is what £108,000 a year buys across 1.6 million people.

Nor is the inability to say what happened to a report unusual. Nine of the responding authorities are holding 2,750 reports between them with no record of the outcome, two of them refusing to answer on cost grounds because it would mean opening every file by hand. Glasgow cannot count the reports at all, because every complaint is logged as a generic service request. Croydon was the only council in the country able to answer, having acted on 15 of 124.

The data is consistent about where the problem sits, and it is not in the specialist trade. Sandwell tested convenience stores exclusively in all three years, and 42 of its 84 targeted test purchases resulted in a sale. West Yorkshire Joint Services, the only service to break its complaints down by shop type, logged 476 underage complaints about grocers against 224 about vape shops, and 219 complaints about illegal vapes in grocers against 142 in vape shops. Kent's own pupil survey found children named corner shops as the most common place they bought vapes.

Specialist vape shops are age-restricted premises that no under-18 can enter, staffed by retailers who check identification at the door. Riot Labs is asking for them to be licensed too, and for that licence to be revocable.

The responses also point consistently to capacity rather than willingness. Glasgow's fixed penalty notices fell from 43 in one year to three the next because, in the council's own words, its covert camera equipment reached the end of its lifespan and the evidence could not be gathered. West Yorkshire, which covers five districts and 2.3 million people on the largest budget of any respondent, tests below the sample average. Within London, a shop in Newham is reached every three years while one in Tower Hamlets waits eighteen. Birmingham seized illicit goods worth nearly ten million pounds in a single year, including more than 200,700 illegal vapes, and still could not say how many of its 409 underage vape reports were actioned.

Where enforcement does happen, it works. Birmingham's own retailer inspections found non-compliance falling from 72 per cent to 42 per cent in a year as advisory visits gave way to enforcement visits.

Ben Johnson, Chief Executive of Riot Labs, said: "A child walking into a shop has better odds of being served than that shop has of being checked this year. Nobody in Whitehall is asking why. They are asking what colour the box should be. Trading Standards are not the problem here. They are enforcing three hundred laws with the staff they have, and the services testing hardest are often the smallest in the country. We do not need new laws on vaping. We need to enforce the ones we already have. You cannot fix a law that isn't being enforced by writing another law and not enforcing that one either."

The consultation, which closes at 11:59pm on 2 October, proposes seven new restrictions, three of them on vaping products: plain packaging, limits on what colour a device can be, and rules on where stock sits in a shop. It proposes nothing on enforcement. Selling a vape to anyone under 18 has been illegal in Britain for more than a decade. Adding seven rules to a law that is barely checked will not change what happens in a shop.

Riot Labs runs a free campaign portal at savevaping.co.uk, built because the consultation is a long form written for policy professionals. The portal takes a retailer or an adult ex-smoker through three actions in about ten minutes: a letter to their Member of Parliament, a guided response to the consultation, and the Relapse Register, a record of former smokers who say the proposed rules would put them at risk of going back to cigarettes. No template wording is provided: every letter and answer is generated from the user's own words and can be edited before it is sent.

Johnson said: "We are a manufacturer asking the Government to license the shops we sell to, to set a minimum number of checks a year, and to take that licence away from anyone caught selling to a child, including anyone selling our products. Plain packaging will not test a single shop. If nobody has the capacity to check, changing the colour of the box is not an answer. It is a distraction."

Riot Labs is asking for the retail licensing scheme already passed in the Tobacco and Vapes Act 2026 and never brought into force, a legal minimum checking frequency for age-restricted products of the kind food hygiene already has, a national standard for recording whether a report led to action, and the licence fee used to fund the enforcement, so the scheme pays for the checks that make it mean anything.

About Riot Labs

Riot Labs is a British vaping company, founded and headquartered in the United Kingdom, manufacturing e-liquids through its in-house flavour development operation, Fantasia Flavour House. It is a member of the UK Vaping Industry Association.

The complete dataset is published for verification at savevaping.co.uk/data, in four spreadsheets, alongside the method behind every calculation and the limits of the data. It carries the figure for every authority that responded.

Requests were sent on 30 July 2026 under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and, in Scotland, the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002. Thirty were sent and 26 answered, covering 21 Trading Standards services and 27 councils: Cardiff, the Vale of Glamorgan and Bridgend share a single service, and West Yorkshire Joint Services is one service covering five districts. The four that did not respond were Cornwall Council, Rhondda Cynon Taf County Borough Council, the City of Edinburgh Council and the Chartered Trading Standards Institute, and no figure has been estimated on their behalf.

Retail outlet counts are Office for National Statistics Inter-Departmental Business Register local units for 2025, covering the four Standard Industrial Classification codes for shops that may sell tobacco or beverages. That is a count of premises where a vape could plausibly be sold, not a register of vape retailers, because no such register exists in England.

The inspection intervals for food premises are set by the statutory Food Law Code of Practice, which requires even the lowest-risk category to be inspected at least once every three years and higher-risk premises considerably more often.

A test purchase is not necessarily a separate shop, because a council may test the same premises more than once, so the coverage figures are a ceiling rather than a headcount. The one in five figure is the failure rate among shops that were tested, and testing is intelligence-led rather than random, so it should not be read as the rate across all shops. The same applies to Sandwell's 42 of 84, which were targeted test purchases.

The shop-type figures cover the underage sales where a council recorded the premises type, which is 385 of the 642 sales in the dataset. Riot Labs does not publish a failure rate comparing specialist vape shops with convenience stores, because the attempt counts are not comparable: general retail received 9.1 test purchases for every one at a specialist retailer, so the two samples are not measuring the same thing.

The budget-per-test-purchase figure divides the net Trading Standards budgets that were supplied, £46.8 million across the three years, by the 2,159 in-person test purchases made by those same services. Glasgow is excluded, as it is from every total here. Authorities that supplied no budget figure are excluded, along with their test purchases. The budget covers every Trading Standards function, from food standards to weights and measures to doorstep crime, and is never vaping alone.

A missing enforcement count is a recording failure and not evidence of inaction. Trading Standards services enforce over 300 pieces of legislation, and several of the services testing hardest in this dataset are among the smallest.

The England-only portion of the dataset contains 2,147 in-person test purchases, 25.5 per cent of every underage vape test purchase the Department of Health and Social Care recorded across England over the same period, with a failure rate of 24.4 per cent against the national 23.9 per cent. The Department notes that this activity is intelligence-led rather than representative, a caveat that applies equally here.

Kent's survey figures are from its report "Young People and Vaping, an update on the Kent School Survey", March 2025. Kent states the survey cannot be benchmarked against national survey data because the methods differ, and it is not presented that way here.

Ben Johnson is available for interview and comment.

Contact

David Donaghy, Riot Press Office

Telephone: 07811191281

Email: press@bemoreriot.com

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