Pharmacy bodies are "shocked" by a report that shows some pharmacies are selling e-cigarettes to young people.

Volunteers aged 13 to 17 were able to purchase e-cigarettes, e-liquid refills and e-shisha products in 46 per cent of the 37 branches of national pharmacy chains they visited and in 74 per cent of 19 independent pharmacies, according to a report published by the Trading Standards Institute (TSI) yesterday (July 2).

Although selling e-cigarettes to young people is legal, 80 per cent of the products purchased in the study – which also investigated newsagents, large retailers and specialist e-cigarette suppliers – featured warnings that they should not be sold to under-18s.

The volunteers were able to buy the products in 40 per cent of visits across all types of retailers.

TSI said the report, which was commissioned by Public Health England (PHE), would help the government decide whether to ban the sale of the electronic devices to young people under the Children and Families Act 2014.

The Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) – which advised pharmacists to shun e-cigarettes earlier this year – said the ban was needed "urgently".

"The results of this survey are shocking. People under 18 should not be able to get hold of e-cigarettes," RPS head of corporate communications Neal Patel told C+D.

Independent Pharmacy Federation chief executive Claire Ward told C+D she was disappointed by the findings and urged independent pharmacists to consider how they portrayed themselves to the public.

"It won't look good to people coming in [to pharmacies] if they're seeing those products being sold to under-18s when there is a warning on them," she said.

Pharmacists needed to make sure they got into the "good habit" of checking customers' age when selling e-cigarettes before the products were licensed in 2016, she added.

Reasons that retailers gave for refusing to sell to the underage customers included a lack of stock, no proof of age and an outright refusal to serve a young person, the TSI said.

The study suggested that there was a "degree of confusion" around the age at which customers could buy the products and the TSI called for retailers to be "proactively educated" on the issue before regulations were introduced.

PHE's national director of health and wellbeing Kevin Fenton said the results were "unacceptable" and the government needed to make sure retailers were aware of their legal responsibilities.

	If you sell e-cigarettes in your pharmacy, what is your policy on sales to young people?