To say the location chosen by Michael Marks and Tom Spencer for their first store has dramatically changed would be something of an understatement.
Once home to industrious Victorian textile workers, 130 years on and today Cheetham Hill is best known for its knock-offs, not its M&S knitwear.
Dubbed ‘Counterfeit Street’, in recent decades this corner of Manchester, located in the shadow of Strangeways prison, has been the place to go for fakes – from £35 copies of Chanel handbags, to £20 ‘Apple Airpods’ and lookalike Canada Goose parkas, a snip at £60.
Warehouses that once produced clothing were replaced by stores selling fake designer gear – which today have been joined by vape shops.
Here in Cheetham Hill, some small back streets have as many as a dozen outlets sitting almost side by side while gaudy adverts line the streets promising ‘big puffs’, ‘premium clouds’ and ‘fantastic flavours’.
Because, as ever, new trends mean new business opportunities – hence the explosion of shops and stores dedicated to selling vapes.
Today the UK e-cigarette market is worth some £1.7billion a year with 5.6million adults in Britain now vaping, about one in ten of the adult population – plus a disturbing number of children are also getting hooked.
Across the country, more than 3,500 independent vape shops dedicated to selling the nicotine-based products have sprung up, a figure that rose by almost five a week in 2023.
Cheetham Hill in Manchester has been dubbed ‘Counterfeit Street’ as it is the place to go for fakes – from £35 copies of Chanel handbags to £20 ‘Apple Airpods’
Vapes are also available in convenience stores, supermarkets and online, as well as from outlets such as barbers, phone repair shops and even sweet shops.
Indeed, take a stroll along any of Britain’s high streets and it would appear that while other businesses are shutting up shop, the vaping industry is booming.
But there are growing concerns that all is not what it seems, with questions asked about exactly how so many shops, often clustered together in a way that is surely not good for sales, are making money from selling vapes – and where the profits are going.
While the growing demand for e-cigarettes clearly represents a genuine business opportunity, there are fears that a significant number of outlets are operating on the margins of legality, with police warning of links to money-laundering activities and organised crime.
Take Manchester. It has the third highest density of specialist vape shops in the country, with 20 outlets per 100,000 residents, according to company registrations.
And it was in one such store in Cheetham Hill last September that police made an extraordinary discovery during a joint raid with Trading Standards officers (although the vast majority of the vape businesses in the area are understood to be entirely legitimate).
Behind shelves bearing legitimate products they discovered a hidden door, leading to another room where shelves were stacked with £1million-worth of illicit and counterfeit vapes.
Today the UK e-cigarette market is worth some £1.7billion a year with 5.6million adults in Britain now vaping, about one in ten of the adult population
Cheetham Hill has dozen of outlets sitting almost side by side while gaudy adverts line the streets promising ‘big puffs’, ‘premium clouds’ and ‘fantastic flavours’
Vapes sold in the UK must comply with regulations relating to their size, to the strength of nicotine they contain and to labelling requirements. They must also feature on a list of products registered with the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA).
But some illegal vapes, a large proportion of which are manufactured in China, have been found to have much higher nicotine content than the legal limit and to contain highly toxic chemicals and even cannabis products.
A year previously, a visit to another vape shop in the same area led to another find – a safe containing £100,000 in cash and the arrest of three men on suspicion of money laundering.
At the time officials warned that the discoveries were linked to organised criminal gangs, with the proceeds going to fund more serious crimes. Given the proliferation of vape shops across the country this is highly concerning.
For the last two years Greater Manchester Police has been cracking down on illegal activities in Cheetham Hill, with vape shops amongst the counterfeiters targeted in a high-profile and highly successful clean-up campaign dubbed Operation Vulcan.
As Chief Inspector Andy Torkington told the Mail, the area became one of the vape ‘hubs’ of Britain as businesses realised how much money there was to be made.
‘You’d drive round there and think ‘Why do you need another vape shop?’,’ he said. ‘But the reality is that a box of legitimate vapes similar to what you’d fit 24 packs of crisps in has a £1,500 mark up on it, from the wholesale price to what you would end up selling to the retailer.
In the Welsh city of Newport in the past 15 months trading standards officers backed by police have raided dozens of shops selling vapes, seizing almost 25,000 of the devices
‘You only have to look at the cars of some of the people to work out the finances that are involved.’
He adds: ‘And, of course, if you can sell the illegal ones the mark up is even greater.’
Illegal disposable vapes often sell for half the price of legitimate ones, which typically go for between £5 and £10 for a 600-puff ‘pod’.
As Chief Inspector Torkington is at pains to point out, the vast majority of the vape businesses in his area are entirely legitimate. But not all.
‘Some do it, not all of them do it, some solely do it, some part do it,’ he says. ‘They used to say ‘that shop is 95 per cent legitimate’. Well that means it is illegitimate then because five percent is selling criminal stuff – that means they are bent, doesn’t it?’
And it is a problem that has surfaced across Britain.
In the year 2023-2024, Trading Standards teams seized 1.2million illegal vapes, a 59 per cent increase on the previous 12 months. Experts estimate the black market could be worth £1billion.
As a National Trading Standards spokesperson told this newspaper: ‘A recent report by Trading Standards has found that the illegal vape market is constantly changing and that organised criminal groups with previous or existing links to tobacco supply, form a key part of the picture. We believe this is an underreported issue and would recommend that more work is done to properly understand the organised crime links.’
In the Welsh city of Newport in the past 15 months trading standards officers backed by police have raided dozens of shops selling vapes, seizing almost 25,000 of the devices.
Fifty different stores have been shut down as a result, with £2m worth of illegal e-cigarettes and counterfeit tobacco seized.
As in Manchester, efforts had been taken to conceal the illicit vapes in false walls or disguised drawers which could only be opened with the touch of a secret button.
In some instances sniffer dogs have had to be used to find them (in one search in Derbyshire a dog found a store of vapes hidden beneath a kitchen unit which could be raised up on hydraulics).
Many of the locations raided had links to organised crime, officers said, with money from illegal vape sales used to fund ‘criminal activity at a higher level’.
‘I think it is clear that there are recognised links to be seen between the sales of illegal vapes and illegal tobacco to criminal exploitation,’ Superintendent Jason White of Gwent Police told the Daily Mail this week.
‘There is a wider impact of those sales as we believe they are being funded or used to fund other types of organised crime, whether that be money laundering, human trafficking and obviously the furtherance of selling illegal drugs in our communities.’
Concerns have also been raised about the effect of illegal vapes on people’s health, particularly those under 18. As well as higher nicotine levels, previous testing of illegal e-cigarettes discovered high levels of dangerous chemicals such as lead, nickel and chromium in some products, as well as diacetyl, a flavouring banned in the UK because it has been linked to a serious lung disease known as ‘popcorn lung’.
Health experts are growing increasingly concerned about vape use amongst young people, with figures showing last year that one in four children aged 11 to 15 in England had tried vaping – up from 22 per cent two years earlier.
The worry is that vape shops selling illegal vapes are also more likely to flout laws that ban the sale of vapes to those aged under 18. Because they are cheaper, they are also more appealing to young users.
Police officers say money from illegal vape sales is used to fund ‘criminal activity at a higher level’
In some instances sniffer dogs have had to be used during raids to find illegal vapes
£2million worth of illegal vape and tobacco products have been seized in south-east Wales in the past 15 months
Raids on vape shops have also unearthed other offences, often relating to the status of those working in the shops.
During a series of raids last year in Redditch in Worcestershire, police found that many of those working in the shops were immigrants who were themselves being exploited.
‘The staff working behind the counters will be purely there to sell and typically won’t be paid national wage and some won’t be legally able to work in the UK,’ said Sergeant Dave Roberts, who is based in the town.
‘The money will disappear in various different bank accounts. One shop closes down another opens, the money made is so vast it will carry on.’
As in Gwent, the authorities are increasingly resorting to using ‘closure orders’ to shut down offending premises for a set period, usually three months.
To do this, magistrates have to agree that ‘on the balance of probabilities that a person has engaged or (if the order is not made) is likely to engage in disorderly, offensive or criminal behaviour on the premises’.
Other action taken includes fines levied against the owners – if they can be tracked down.
A recent insight into the process came from a court case held at Salisbury Magistrates’ Court in August when Wiltshire County Council successfully applied for a closure order against the Red Power vape shop. In a raid by Trading Standards a sniffer dog found more than 1,000 illicit vapes hidden behind electronic trap doors in the shop.
Previously, a 15-year-old had also successfully bought an illegal vape on behalf of trading standards following complaints from the public.
The owner was identified as a man called Niaz Ali, who was living Iraq and had never visited the premises.
According to a report in the local paper, Ali did not appear in court to represent himself and instead sent an email in which he said he is ‘certainly not guilty of selling any illegal counterfeit substances’.
He told the court he had been in Iraq caring for his father who was at the ‘end of his life cycle’ but intended to return to the UK.
He explained how he relied on income from the shop to support his family and pay his father’s medical bills.
A closure order was imposed for three months.
Fines can also be imposed, as in a case last week in which Solihull Council prosecuted shopkeeper Abdul Qadar for selling illegal vapes at Vapourmist Ltd in Olton, Solihull. He was fined a total of £11,100 pounds after trading standards seized 472 over-sized vapes.
Of them, 65 contained nicotine despite the product packaging stating: ‘This product does not contain any nicotine’.
Unsurprisingly, illegal practices and publicity such as this are causing deep concern for the majority of vape-selling outlets, both online and on the High Street, who operate in accordance with the law.
The UK Vaping Industry Association (UKVIA) has long called for a licensing scheme to be introduced to stop rogue traders from selling to minors and profiting from the black market. They also want to see fines of £10,000 introduced for every breach of the regulations.
‘We want to make sure that the people operating in our sector are of good standing, are following the rules and are not selling to kids,’ John Dunne, director-general of the UKVIA told the Mail.
‘Right now I can tell you that is not the case. There are lots of retailers out there in every sector breaking the rules and selling these products to whoever. They don’t care, they just want to make profit out of it and that is what we have to stamp out.’
And he added: ‘All of the laws at the moment prohibit everything that is happening, they are just not being robustly enforced and we will do everything in our power to shut these rogue retailers down. We don’t want them in our industry.’
As part of the forthcoming Tobacco and Vapes Bill, the Labour government has agreed to look at licensing for vape retailers, something Mr Dunne describes as ‘fantastic’.
‘We feel that only reputable premises should be allowed to sell vapes,’ he says. ‘They should only be sold by premises that sell cigarettes, so a convenience store for instance, or by a speciality vape retailer who is providing education and support, or on online specialist retailer.
‘And to get that licence there should be some criteria like you have to age verification training, for instance. This is something we require of all our members and have done for several years.’
Separate legislation that will come in to force next summer will see another major change when disposable vapes are banned from sale.
The move is intended to help the environment and remove a product from the shelves that appeals to underage vapers.
But some have warned that unless enforcement is tightened up the ban could see users simply look to the black market for supplies, with one poll showing that four in ten people said they would buy banned disposables ‘from whichever channels’ they can.
Back in Cheetham Hill and while police say that shops there are now fully aware of the law, clearly not all the customers are.
When the Mail visited earlier this week, one male shopper admitted: ‘I came to get stronger vapes than you can get elsewhere. But I’ve been to two shops and they claim they haven’t got any. I think I just haven’t been to the right one yet.’
The worry is that he might not have to look for long.
This article was originally published by a www.dailymail.co.uk . Read the Original article here. .