Banning vaping in public? What is Labour smoking?

The UK government has announced its intention to ban vaping in public places.

In response to a written question from a Tory MP about banning vaping in pubs, public-health minister Ashley Dalton declared that: ‘Vapes release an aerosol that exposes people to nicotine and potential toxicants and it is important that we act to protect people from these potential health harms.’ It’s on this premise that ministers say they want to make all public places vape-free, just as they are already smoke-free.

The issue with this is that the government’s claims about vaping have no scientific justification. They are not supported by its own public-health advisers, nor by decades of research, nor even by the government’s own prior guidance. A vaping-in-public ban is not evidence-based policymaking, but prejudice, panic and spite masquerading as a concern for public health.

A landmark 2015 evidence review from the now-abolished quango, Public Health England (PHE), clearly stated: ‘EC [e-cigarette] use releases negligible levels of nicotine into ambient air with no identified health risks to bystanders.’ PHE’s subsequent guidance on vaping in public went further, saying, ‘e-cigarettes have significant potential to help reduce tobacco use and the serious harm it causes to smokers, those around them and wider society. Recognition of this should be at the centre of policies on e-cigarette use in public places and workplaces.’ The guidance even warned that it ‘is never acceptable to require vapers to share the same outdoor space with smokers’. In other words, vaping should not be treated the same as combustible tobacco use, because that would risk undermining the very harm-reduction benefits of switching.

Furthermore, the PHE’s 2018 evidence review found ‘no identified health risks of passive vaping to the health of bystanders’. That position has only been reinforced by later research.

Most recently, an exhaustive 1,468-page review by the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities into the health harms of vaping, published in 2022, came to the same conclusion. It reported that ‘compared with cigarettes, vaping products produce no or little side-stream emissions, so we would expect effects on bystanders to be low’. It further found that ‘there is moderate evidence that acute secondhand exposure to vaping-product aerosol does not result in detectable levels of nicotine or biomarkers of potential toxicants in non-users’.

Having analysed the potential risks one by one, the conclusions were unanimous: ‘There is insufficient evidence whether acute secondhand exposure to vaping has any effects on blood pressure or heart rate’; ‘there is insufficient evidence of any impact of acute secondhand vaping exposure on respiratory disease’, and so on. In fact, the report found ‘insufficient evidence’ for any material risk worthy of a government prohibition. In other words, if secondhand vaping has any effect at all, it is too small to detect.

So why the sudden zeal to ban vaping in public spaces? If there is no evidence to support the claim that a ban protects others, we can only assume it is a policy driven by something else. By a desire, perhaps, to be seen to be ‘doing something’ in response to political pressures, regardless of whether that something makes sense.

Applying this same ‘precautionary principle’ could justify banning people with colds from public spaces, because sneezing may spread germs. It could justify banning coffee, since caffeine is a drug with health effects. It could even justify banning food with strong odours, in case someone finds the smell unpleasant.

In a liberal democracy, laws that restrict people’s freedoms must be proportionate to the risks involved. Yet here the government is considering a sweeping prohibition with no evidence of material risk at all. Meanwhile, smokers who might otherwise switch to vapes are given yet another reason not to bother.

This stance is ironic considering that the government’s ‘swap to stop’ scheme is widely considered a success. This scheme encourages smokers to switch to free vapes offered by stop-smoking services. But now, the government is also advising the public not to use vapes.

The Royal College of Physicians issued a stark warning against this kind of overcautious policymaking back in 2016. If a ‘risk-averse, precautionary’ approach also ‘makes e-cigarettes less easily accessible, less palatable or acceptable, more expensive, less consumer-friendly or pharmacologically less effective, or inhibits innovation and development of new and improved products, then it causes harm by perpetuating smoking’, it said. That is precisely what a ban would do – it would reinforce the false belief that vaping is as harmful as smoking, frighten smokers away from switching and stigmatise those who have already quit through the use of safer products.

Quite apart from having nothing to do with health, the government’s proposal for vape-free areas gives licence to politicians who dislike nicotine users to use the law to harass them. That is not a proportionate public-health response. It is an abuse of state power. Once a global leader in tobacco-harm reduction, the UK now ignores its own science to embrace empty gestures, throwing common sense – along with respect for its citizens and the rights of property owners – into the gutter.

Public health should be about saving lives, not pandering to prejudice. A public vaping ban won’t protect anyone from harm, but it will ensure that more smokers remain smokers. And that can cause nothing but harm.

Martin Cullip is international fellow at the Taxpayers Protection Alliance’s Consumer Centre and is based in South London, UK.