Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to reduce the use of vapes by children in and around schools.

Given the recent increase in children vaping, the Government launched a call for evidence to identify opportunities to reduce the number of children accessing and using vaping products. The call for evidence has now closed and we are currently analysing the responses including for the theme ‘Effective educational approaches to prevent child use of vapes’. Following this, the Government will consider a range of options based on the evidence provided, including potential changes to vaping policy and regulation.

The Prime Minister also recently announced several measures to address youth vaping, including closing a loophole that allows industry from giving out free samples to people of any age. As part of the wider review of relationships, sex and health education, we will update the health education curriculum to teach children about the harmful effects of vaping. The Government will also write to police forces to ensure dedicated school liaison officers across the country are aware of the Government's work on vaping and can make use of new resources to raise awareness of harms and the law, as well as supporting enforcement of school bans.

To make young people aware of the risks of using vapes, in October 2022 we published new vaping content on the Talk to Frank and Better Health websites and developed a suite of resources for schools to use, including the recently published year nine lesson plan published by the PSHE Association. These can be found at the following link:

https://pshe-association.org.uk/resource/vaping?hsLang=en