The government’s new high street vape shop powers amount to the most substantive planning intervention on town-centre retail in a generation, and it would be easier to dismiss them as electioneering if the underlying problem were not genuinely serious.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham has announced that every new vape shop in England will require explicit planning permission from its local council before opening. Betting shops and 24-hour slot machine venues will lose the protection of the so-called ‘aim to permit’ rule, a quirk introduced under Tony Blair’s 2005 gambling liberalisation legislation that has prevented councils from refusing new applications even where local opposition is strong. Closure orders for mini-marts and vape shops caught selling illegal tobacco can now run for up to twelve months.
The planning change for vapes matters more than it might appear at first glance. Currently, vape shops sit in the same planning category as ordinary shops, cafes and banks, meaning they can open without a new planning application at all. The government intends a fast-tracked six-week consultation on moving them into a separate category, with measures targeted to be in place by the start of 2027.
The Criminal Cash Behind High Street Vape Shop Powers
The political logic only makes sense once you absorb the scale of what has been happening. The National Crime Agency (NCA) estimates that at least £1bn of criminal cash is laundered annually through high street businesses, including mini-marts, barber shops, vape stores and sweet shops. That figure sits within a broader estimate of at least £12bn of criminal cash generated across the UK each year in total.
Operation Machinize 2 gives some sense of what enforcement at scale looks like. The NCA helped plan raids on more than 2,700 premises, resulting in 924 arrests and the seizure of £10.7m of suspected illegal proceeds. NCA Deputy Director of Illicit Finance Sal Melki said: ‘We will not stop and having the support of the High Street Organised Crime Unit to grow the Machinize partnership will enable us to target and disrupt more high harm offenders. The HSOCU will be key to a whole of government response.’
The new High Street Organised Crime Unit, overseen by Security Minister Dan Jarvis, will direct this work going forward. Jarvis told BBC News there would be thousands of raids on high streets across the country in the coming months, and that he was ‘confident we will see serious organised criminals imprisoned’ and ‘millions of pounds of laundered money seized’.
The £30m enforcement budget backing the unit runs over three years, according to analysis by the Royal United Services Institute. Spread across that period, it is not a large sum relative to the problem it is meant to address. Whether the planning changes convert into prosecutions, or merely into a longer queue of planning applications, is a different question entirely.
Opposition Parties See Empty Shops Where Burnham Sees Rogue Operators
Conservative shadow communities secretary Sir James Cleverly argued that Labour’s increases to business rates have already left empty units across the country, and that tightening planning regulation would produce ‘more empty and boarded up shops.’ Reform UK’s Robert Jenrick made a similar case, insisting the policy ‘will only create even more empty shops’ without accompanying tax relief. The Lib Dems’ Max Wilkinson said the plan ‘could go up in a puff of smoke’ without stronger enforcement powers. The Greens want rent controls for small businesses.
The Betting and Gaming Council, for its part, supports ‘tough action against criminal operators’ but noted that around 3,000 betting shops have closed since 2019, pushing back against the suggestion that the sector is spreading unchecked.
Burnham pointed to Operation Vulcan in Cheetham Hill, Greater Manchester, as proof of concept. He told the BBC that the operation cleared the area of counterfeits and crime and ‘proved’ what the national approach could achieve. In Cradley Heath, six mini-marts and vape shops on a single high street were forced to close after a police and Trading Standards investigation. Freedom of Information requests revealed that 3,700 illegal shops had operated across the UK, a figure that went largely uncontested.
My read is that the planning measures are necessary but not sufficient. Vetting planning applications costs councils money and staff time they do not always have, and organised criminals are not known for submitting honest applications. The harder test comes in the enforcement figures that emerge in 12 to 18 months. If the arrest count stays in the hundreds while the laundering estimates remain in the billions, the gap between the ambition and the delivery will be impossible to paper over.
