2025 Session 2 Seminars

The Department of Business and Trade, representing the Office for Product Safety and Standards, is the UK's regulator for Waste, Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) and Waste Portable Battery regulations, overseeing “WEEE & Battery take back Schemes”. As Senior Compliance Lead, Bubbly Sandhu will introduce the roles of the DBT and OPSS and their focus on promoting responsible product stewardship. The session will clarify the key regulations, highlight the environmental impact of vape waste, and examine compliance challenges specific to this rapidly changing sector. Bubbly will define good compliance, share enforcement insights, and outline future priorities to help develop a more sustainable vaping industry.

During this session, David Hunt will emphasise the importance and scope of collaboration with all relevant agencies in establishing a compliant and legitimate industry. He will focus on his joint work with the MHRA on the Vape Expert Panel scheme, which refers new and novel products for examination and testing. This process helps prevent many poor-quality devices, including child-friendly products and packaging, from entering the legal supply chain. David will discuss common issues he observes and how compliance has evolved since its introduction, noting that increasingly, businesses are voluntarily self-referring before submission, which supports the legitimate industry in making changes and achieving compliance more swiftly.

In this presentation, Kate Pike from Trading Standards will discuss how criminals have entered the UK vaping space and the size and scale of the challenge they present. These criminal groups are solely motivated by making as much money as possible from this commodity. They have no concern for public health, safety, compliance, the environment, or good business practices. Kate will examine what regulators and law enforcement can do to address this issue and what the industry can do to support these efforts.

Product standards are basic quality requirements that may apply to all products within a product class. This could include, for example, a maximum nicotine concentration, that the product be sold in a child-resistant container, or that the product not contain specified ingredients (e.g. diacetyl or vitamin E acetate). Certain basic assumptions are required to have an evidence-based discussion of product standards that might benefit public health. The standard should be enforceable. All e-cig product standards should recognize that e-cigs are just one type of nicotine product, and that all nicotine products exist along a continuum of risk, with cigarettes at the high end and nicotine patches at the low end with e-cigarettes somewhere in the middle. It will not improve public health to pass rigid new standards for lower-risk products (e.g., e-cigarettes) while failing to pass equally or more stringent standards for higher-risk products (e.g., cigarettes). A framework for considering nicotine product standards should also recognize that nicotine products compete with and can substitute for other nicotine products. It should also acknowledge the limited success that governments around the world have had in simply banning popular classes of drug-delivery products, or of persuading everyone to abstain from substances that people find reinforcing or addictive voluntarily. Product standards that are appropriate for public health are those that help consumers to transition away from the most harmful products and towards much less harmful alternative products, and ideally quit harmful products before their harms are realized. A key component of the success of this type of regulation is that governments and public health and scientific organizations provide accurate information to the public about the relative risks of products they have access to, along with evidence-based guidance on how to switch or quit.

The UK Vaping Duty will raise the price of e-liquids, with the main aim of discouraging e-cigarette use among non-smokers, particularly young people. However, there is still a lot we don’t know: How responsive will young people be to price increases? To what extent will higher prices discourage adults who smoke from switching to vaping? What are the implications of the duty for health inequalities? Could the vaping duty increase misperceptions about the harms of vaping? Could the vape duty be configured differently to reduce unintended consequences? This talk will explore what we do, and what we don’t know, about the likely impact of the vaping duty, setting an agenda for future research.

Since their arrival in 2019, nicotine pouches have become an increasingly visible part of the nicotine market in Great Britain, promoted through billboards, social media, and sponsorships of motorsports and music festivals. Their rise in popularity has taken place in a regulatory vacuum, with no limits on age-of-sale or nicotine strength and minimal restrictions on advertising. The public health impact will depend on who is using them and for what purpose: are they more often a tool for cessation and harm reduction among people who smoke, or a new route into nicotine for those who might otherwise never have used it? This presentation will draw on new population data to address these questions and consider what the UK’s forthcoming Tobacco and Vapes Bill could mean for their future.

• How important are consumer product preferences when designing regulatory legislation?
• Does prohibition make enforcement easier?
• What are the critical considerations when choosing between different regulatory approaches?
• What regulatory opportunities have we missed?