Draft Environmental Protection (Single-use Vapes) (Scotland) Regulations 2024 consultation: SG response – Responses from those with links to the tobacco industry

Organisation: Haco Convenience Store – D. A. Crossan - Indirect

Do you have any feedback on the draft regulations to prohibit the sale and supply of single-use vapes in Scotland? - Please give us your views:

“I Own a Convenience Store in Largs and We sell Disposable Vapes. This legislation that you are proposing simply will not work but I also have solutions as well based on over 50 years in Retail. I'll summarise them in bullet points.

1) Banning disposable Vapes like any Prohibition will put them into the hands of Criminals and/or overseas online portal's whereby people will just order them online for delivery into the UK. This will put an added restrain on customs having to check for these devices being delivered.

2) 1st Solution. Make a Legal Requirement that all retailers must have an environmental disposable Bin in store so the public can dispose of these disposable vapes so they can get recycled.

3) Tax them just like cigarettes! That way the exchequer gets even more revenue into their coffers. Make them the same price as a packet of cigarettes and the Govt takes 75 percent of the sales as they do now.

Please believe me being in retail for 50 years if you ban these devices like any Prohibition has proven, all the way back to Al Capone in the 1930's all you'll do is put them into the hands of Criminals or Unscrupulous companies off shore who will I guarantee market them on the Dark Web.

You need to wake up sorry to be blunt but you do. Don't Ban them! Bin Them ethically and tax them more legitimately.”

Do you have any concerns about how these regulations would work in practice? - Please give us your views:

“See above”