King's College London

The project aims to create the first national system for tracking vaping cessation in England. This will provide evidence to inform decisions about the Tobacco and Vapes Bill. The aim is to understand how often people try to quit vaping, how motivated they are to quit, how they try to quit, and how successful they are. The project also looks at how people who vape think they may react to future regulations, such as flavour bans, plain packaging, product display changes, and higher taxes. It also aims to examine what happens to people’s smoking behaviour when they attempt to quit vaping, including whether any policies on vaping might have unintended results such as people taking up smoking again.

The study will add a new set of questions on vaping to the Smoking Toolkit Study (STS), which is a monthly telephone survey of around 1,700 people in England. The new questions will be asked from April 2026 to December 2027. They will ask people why they vape, what devices and flavours they use, whether they try to quit vaping and how successful they are, what they think about future regulations on vaping and how these regulations might change their behaviour. Different questions will be asked every two or four months depending on what the researchers want to focus on.

We will use responses to the survey to look for patterns, compare groups, and assess the impact of new policies over time. There are some limits to the study, for example, we don’t yet know exactly when the new policies will start, and people’s predictions about how they might behave may not always match what they actually do.

The study will provide policymakers with up-to-date and accurate data on the effects of current and possible future vaping regulations. The findings will also help assess the “Swap to Stop” scheme, which provides vape starter kits to people who smoke, by tracking how many later go on to quit vaping as well.

Once the new Tobacco and Vapes Bill is law, the project will allow us to see both its intended effects on vaping (such as increased quitting) and unintended effects (such as people turning back to cigarettes). By looking at differences across groups of people from different backgrounds and ages, the study will help identify inequalities and ensure that changes to policies on vaping do not harm specific groups of people more than others.