Upcoming government legislation has been called the "nail in the coffin" for the hard-pressed convenience sector by Andrew Boff, a Conservative Londonwide Assembly Member, due to an ill-planned licensing scheme for tobacco, vapes and nicotine products which places retailers in financial and legal jeopardy.
Implementation of the scheme would impose on retailers up-front costs plus annual fees for accreditation, plus staff and security overheads in excess to those currently facing store-owners. Some fear such charges and costs could spell disaster for already struggling local neighbourhood shops.
With excessive taxes and underfunded enforcement leading to what is being described as an imminent collapse of the legal tobacco and vapes market (see our story, Black market tobacco boom axing legal tobacco sales), many now believe that the illicit market is set to eclipse the legal one, at the expense of conscientious, law-abiding c-store owners.
As far as enforcement is concerned, new research has uncovered the shocking fact that over 20 local authorities afflicted with the highest levels of illicit tobacco trading are the very ones that have made no or inadequate funding provisions to implement the new licencing scheme. This is an administrative incompetence that will not excuse the retailers from non-compliance, despite a lack of legal support from the places where they pay their business rates.
A total of 27 councils responded to a survey on the issue, with 92 per cent of them admitting they had not even started to prepare for the new licensing system, (which operates like alcohol licensing).
Just a single council was able to supply figures for their for alcohol licensing funding while none at all affirmed they had allotted a penny for applying the new tobacco and vape rules. Only seven respondents had any records to show what they had expended in tackling illicit tobacco in their catchments over the past five years, and eight of them (including boroughs such as Lambeth, Hammersmith & Fulham, the City of London, Waltham Forest, Bournemouth, Coventry, Wolverhampton, and Liverpool) said they were sure they had spent nothing at all on the problem.
The survey, consisting of a series of Freedom of Information requests, initially contacted 60 councils, of which less than half responded. Just three of them – Glasgow, Wolverhampton, and Camden – said they were undertaking any preparation for implementing the measures contained in the upcoming Tobacco and Vape Bill’s licencing regime.
The situation places retailers in the unenviable position of being forced to police all the points of supply to their shops without administrative support, leaving them liable for any accidental purchase of illicit goods that are flooding every part of the market: the number of cigarettes bought on the legal market fell by 45.5 per cent between 2021 and 2024.
Retailers will face fines and bans if illicit goods are discovered on their premises when, at the same time it will become increasingly difficult to be sure that they are buying legal goods.
In addition, they are liable if they do not possess the necessary licence to sell tobacco and vapes, and yet the machinery for obtaining one is inadequate and almost entirely unfunded – making retailers “low-hanging fruit” for enforcement agencies keen to show they are “tackling crime”.
The only perfectly safe option if obtaining a licence is impossible is for storeowners to cease the sale of products on whose revenue their businesses often depend.
