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UK vaping rates will overtake smoking rates for the first time ever, according to new research.
The UK is expected, in 2025, to become the first country in the world to see vaping surpass smoking – according to the Global State of Tobacco Harm Reduction (GSTHR), a project from the public health agency Knowledge Action Change (KAC).
The project used data from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) and the public health charity Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) to estimate vaping would continue to rise above the 11% recorded in 2024, while smoking would fall to just over 10% in 2025.
Role of government and the NHS
It credited the UK’s positive attitude towards vaping and the role of the National Health Service (NHS) in encouraging people to switch from smoking to vaping as contributions to crossing the milestone.
“When vaping overtakes smoking next year in the UK, it will not be simply the consequence of a consumer-led revolution, although this has been significant, it will also be the result of successive governments making pragmatic policy decisions based on the evidence in front of them,” said David MacKintosh, a director of KAC. “Maintaining a clear focus on reducing the use of combustible cigarettes provides an opportunity to achieve the ambitious 2030 ‘smokefree’ target.”
Smoking has fallen from nearly 25% (23.7%) in 2005, which GSTHR marks as the first year vaping became available in the UK. It took ten years for vaping to reach 5.4% of the population, which saw a roughly equivalent drop in smoking (to 17.2%). And in 2019 as well as 2022, the figures again roughly correlated – with vaping in 2019 having increased to 7.1% and smoking having fallen to 14.5%, before moving to 8.7% and 12.9%, respectively, in 2022.
Have ex-smokers switched to vaping?
This correlation is not direct causation. However, ASH reported that in its last survey – the one showing a vaping rate of 11% in 2024 – more than half of ex-smokers who quit in the last five years said they had used an e-cigarette in their last quit attempt – amounting to 2.7m people. According to the data, two-thirds of these ex-smokers who used e-cigarettes to quit are current vapers, and the remaining third have quit both.
This was further supported by a 2022 evidence review on vaping in England commissioned by the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID), which found vaping products were the most common aid used by people to quit smoking and that stop-smoking services had found attempts to quit involving an e-cigarette had a higher rate of success than those that did not (64.9% to 58.6% for a period between 2020 and 2021).
“While smoking rates had been falling in the UK for many decades, the near 50% reduction in the proportion of adults who smoke that has taken place since vapes were introduced to the country shows the positive potential of tobacco harm reduction,” the GSTHR said. “The UK experience adds further evidence that when appropriate, acceptable [nicotine products], such as vapes, are made accessible and affordable, those who smoke will make the choice to switch to them in increasing numbers.”
Avoiding ‘moral panics’
It added that while this was a consumer-driven phenomenon, the UK government had played a role by both publishing science on the safety of vaping relative to smoking as well as endorsing and promoting their use as a smoking-cessation tool.
“The UK has to a large extent, so far, avoided the moral panics about vaping that have influenced political decisions in some countries, and has not experienced the degree of anti-vaping rhetoric and policy influence of prominent but ill-informed philanthropic foundations that has affected other parts of the world,” the GSTHR said, in a not particularly veiled reference to the Bloomberg Philanthropies foundation and its efforts to eliminate all nicotine use as potentially dangerous regardless of the impact that would have on smoking.
The data on vaping and smoking rate estimates done by the GSTHR will be published in the project’s Global State of Tobacco Harm Reduction report later this year.
– Freddie Dawson ECigIntelligence staff
Cigarette image: GraphicsSC
