Age verification policy

01The legal position

It is illegal in the United Kingdom to sell nicotine-containing products to anyone under 18, and the legal responsibility for getting that right sits with the retailer rather than the customer. We apply the same restriction to zero-nicotine products and to accessories, because a bright line is easier to enforce than a judgement call.

We operate a Challenge 25 policy in our retail shop: if you look under 25, you will be asked for identification even if you are 30.

02How the online check works

At the age gate on entry, we ask you to confirm you are over 18. That is an acknowledgement, not a verification, and it is not what we rely on.

The real check happens at checkout. We submit your name, address and date of birth to a regulated third-party verification provider, which checks them against electoral roll and credit reference data. It is a soft, non-scoring check: it does not appear as a credit application and has no effect on your credit file.

For the large majority of customers this passes silently in under two seconds and you will not notice it happened.

03If the automatic check does not pass

A failed automatic check usually means nothing more than that you have recently moved, are not on the electoral roll, or are young enough to have a thin credit file. It is not an accusation.

You will be asked to upload a photograph of a passport, a photocard driving licence, or a PASS-accredited proof-of-age card. A member of our team reviews it — not an algorithm — usually within two working hours during opening times.

04What we keep afterwards

We do not keep the image. It is deleted within 72 hours of the check completing. We do not keep your full date of birth beyond the derived over-18 flag, and we do not keep the full document number.

Once your account has a passed check on it, future orders go through without repeating the process.

• A pass or fail result.
• The date the check was carried out.
• The last four characters of the document reference, where a document was used.

05At the door

Every nicotine parcel requires an age-verified signature from someone 18 or over. Couriers are instructed not to leave parcels in a safe place, in a porch, or with a neighbour, and we cannot override that instruction for you.

If the person at the door looks under 25, the courier will ask for identification. If it is not produced, the parcel comes back to us.

06If you are under 18

We will not sell to you, and no amount of correspondence will change that. If you are trying to stop smoking and you are under 18, your GP and your local stop-smoking service can help, free of charge and without involving your parents if you would rather they were not.