Against the vape ban
February 27, 2026 by thecritic.co.uk
Against the vape ban
No sooner had I written last week’s column about how the government is undermining its goal of a “smokefree” England by going to war on vaping than the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) announced plans to ban vaping in every publicly accessible building in the land. What are they thinking? To find out, I read DHSC’s Impact Assessment (IA). Impact Assessments were introduced in the 1990s in an attempt to make policy-making “evidence-based” but they soon became a burden on the civil servants who were compelled to turn the vibes-based policies of impulsive politicians into sensible pieces of legislation that balance costs against benefits.
