The Tobacco and Vapes Bill has cleared Parliament and is waiting for Royal Assent to become law. Inside the cigar industry, a lot of people assume that a future government will come in and reverse it. That is unlikely to happen, and the reason has nothing to do with Westminster.

The Public Doesn’t Know The Difference

Smoking isn’t popular in the UK. Most people see it as a bad habit, a health risk, and something the country would be better off without. So, when a government says it wants to make Britain smoke-free, that goes down well with the public. A YouGov poll in August 2024 found that 61% of UK adults supported the generational ban, with only 27% against it. That’s where public opinion sits, and it isn’t really up for debate. Governments have spent the last 20 years tightening the rules around smoking, from indoor bans to plain packaging to higher duty, and each step has been accepted without much pushback. The direction has been clear for a long time.

The problem for the cigar industry is that cigars get caught up in all of it. To most people, tobacco is tobacco. They don’t see a difference between someone smoking 20 cigarettes a day and someone having a cigar once a month at a wedding or on a birthday. The way cigars are used, the people who use them, and the product itself are all different from cigarettes, but none of that matters to someone who has never looked into it. From the outside, it all looks the same. Cigars don’t really have a voice with the general public, and most people have no reason to think about them at all. When a bill like this comes along, cigars get included by default, not because anyone sat down and made a case for why they should be.

The cigar industry knows the difference inside out. Cigars and other tobacco products make up around 1.2% of the UK tobacco market. The customer base is mostly over 35, and people tend to enjoy a cigar occasionally rather than daily. Cigars aren’t a gateway product and aren’t driving young people into smoking, and the data showing this has been in front of Parliament the whole way through. None of it has changed the outcome. The industry understands the difference. The general public doesn’t, and there is no real reason they would. Cigars aren’t part of everyday life for most people, they aren’t something you’d think about unless you’re in the trade or you enjoy them yourself. So when the word tobacco comes up, cigars get grouped in with everything else without a second thought. That gap is the whole story.

Too Popular to Overturn

Most people assume cigars are as harmful as cigarettes, or worse. The logic seems obvious from the outside, a cigar is bigger, thicker, and has more tobacco in it, so it must be worse for you. That reasoning skips past how cigars are actually used, how often, and whether the smoke is inhaled, but that level of detail doesn’t reach the general public. Independent research and industry data exist, but they don’t make it into the conversations people have at work or at home. What people know is what they’ve absorbed from years of anti-smoking messaging, and that messaging has always treated tobacco as a single category.

That’s the framing the cigar industry is up against, and it’s the framing any politician has to work with too. A law that bans the sale of tobacco to a whole generation reads, to the public, as a straightforward health measure. Anyone arguing against it ends up looking like they’re defending something harmful, even if the product they’re talking about is used once a month at a wedding rather than twenty times a day. The finer points don’t cut through, because the audience isn’t sorting the products into categories to begin with.

That is what makes the law so difficult to challenge politically. A politician looking at the Tobacco and Vapes Bill sees something that polls well, has support across both major parties, is backed by every major health charity in the country, and costs nothing to leave alone. Repealing it would mean going to the public and making the case for why tobacco should be sold to future generations, which is not an argument any government is likely to want to have. It would mean defending a product most people believe is harmful, in order to protect an industry most people don’t think about. The political cost is likely to be high and the reward close to nothing.

This is why the idea that a future government will come in and scrap the law is unlikely to hold up. Once a party is in government and has to weigh the actual cost of reversing a popular public health law, the calculation changes completely. The closest comparison is the 2007 indoor smoking ban. That was also controversial before it passed, also fought by parts of the hospitality industry, and also talked about as something that might eventually be rolled back. Nearly 20 years later, nobody in mainstream politics would touch it. The generational ban looks to be on the same path.

The Fight That Matters

The cigar trade is tiny in the context of the wider tobacco market. Around 100 to 120 specialist tobacconists operate in the UK, most of them small family businesses. The industry, including importers, distributors, and retailers, employs roughly 800 people in total. That’s not the kind of scale that gets a politician’s attention when it’s sitting next to a public health law backed by the majority of the country.

The industry made its case throughout the bill’s passage. Hunters and Frankau, JJ Fox, Barkers of Harrogate, J Cortes and others submitted written evidence. The Earl of Lindsay, along with a group of other peers, tabled twelve amendments in the Lords, seeking either to exempt handmade cigars, pipe tobacco and nasal tobacco from the bill, or to require a proper impact assessment before the rules applied to them. Every one of those amendments failed. No carve-outs were granted. Baroness Merron gave verbal assurances that the government didn’t want to put specialist tobacconists out of business through future packaging rules, and committed to an impact assessment before any packaging regulations came in. That was as far as it went. None of it made the final text of the bill.

What this means in practice is that the cigar industry now operates inside a law that is unlikely to come off the books. The generational ban takes effect on 1 January 2027, and from that point the legal age for buying any tobacco product, including cigars, rises by one year every year. For the existing cigar customer base, mostly over 35, nothing changes for a long time. The more immediate concern is what comes next, because the bill hands ministers the power to bring in new packaging rules, licensing requirements, and product regulations through secondary legislation. Plain packaging for cigars is the one most people in the trade are watching, because it would affect the product itself and the way it’s sold, and it would apply long before the generational ban has any real effect on who is allowed to buy them.

This is where the industry’s focus needs to sit. Primary legislation has passed and is unlikely to come back. The fight that’s actually still live is over the regulations ministers will write in the months and years after Royal Assent. That’s where the packaging rules, licensing scheme, and enforcement details get decided, and that’s where the cigar trade still has room to make its case, through consultation, evidence, and direct engagement with the Department of Health and Social Care. It’s a smaller fight than the one that’s just been lost, but it’s the one that matters now.

Final Thoughts

The Tobacco and Vapes Act is likely to be part of British law for the foreseeable future. No government is likely to repeal it, and no opposition is likely to campaign seriously on overturning it, because there’s little to gain from doing either. There is a small chance that a future government sympathetic to the cigar trade could use secondary legislation to carve out exceptions for handmade cigars and other premium tobacco, without touching the Act itself. New Zealand went further and repealed its own generational ban in 2024, so the idea isn’t without precedent, but the political conditions here are different and public support for the law remains high. The more useful question now is what can still be shaped. Packaging, licensing, enforcement, and the way ministers choose to use the powers this law has given them. That is where the cigar trade still has a voice, and that is where the next few years will be spent.