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Paedophile gangs are “brazenly” grooming children in vape shops on Britain’s high streets, ministers have been warned.

Matt Vickers, the Shadow Policing Minister, warned perverts are giving youngsters e-cigarettes for free if they perform sexual “favours”.

Investigators found, during a series of raids at vape shops, sickening evidence of workers practising English to groom children.

One Trading Standards officer revealed: “We get the people behind the counter to empty their pockets.

“We’ve been in situations where they empty their pockets and they’ve got reams of condoms.

“I once came across a book and it was basically written in Kurdish and it was translated and basically they were learning English words for ‘you’re pretty, I love your hair, you know, you’re young and beautiful’.”

And Mr Vickers warned many dodgy shops are being run by “organised criminal networks” who are “preying on our children”.

Officers in Dudley, West Midlands, even received reports that men linked to one shop were taking 12-year-old customers to “unknown locations”, prompting fears of abuse.

Kuldeep Maan, Principal Trading Standards Officer, told Channel 4 News: “The biggest threat is to our children. These shops are stickered up, nobody knows what goes on.

“We have complaints that vapes and illegal goods are perhaps given free to children on occasion in return for sexual favours. We have had those complaints before.

“They could be offered drugs, vapes, cigarettes, that is a danger.”

Mr Vickers, who has been scrutinising the Government’s approach to tackling the illicit vape trade, told the Daily Express: “These are not corner shops cutting corners, these are organised criminal networks potentially preying on our children, operating brazenly on our high streets while enforcement teams are starved of resources.

“And yet the Government presses ahead with a Tobacco and Vapes Bill that does nothing to tackle the illicit trade fuelling this exploitation. Banning legal products and piling regulation onto legitimate retailers will not shut down a single criminal vape shop.

“It will do the opposite, it will hand these gangs an even bigger market, more profit, and more opportunity to draw vulnerable young people into their web.

“If ministers are serious about protecting children, they need to stop chasing headlines and start funding proper enforcement, licensing retail premises, and giving Trading Standards and police the tools they need to dismantle these networks.

“Until then, this Bill is a gift to the very criminals it claims to be fighting.”

A bombshell 200-page report by Baroness Louise Casey concluded crimes committed by Pakistani or Asian grooming gangs were covered up to avoid inflaming community tensions.

She accused officials of being in “denial” about the scale of the grooming gangs problem.

The report also revealed asylum seekers and foreign nationals have been involved in a “significant proportion” of live police investigations.

An entire chapter of the Casey Review was labelled “Denial” and told how public bodies used “flawed data” to dismiss claims about “Asian grooming gangs as sensationalised, biased or untrue”.

Officials feared being called racist if they spoke out against Asian or Pakistani grooming gangs, it added.

Criminal defence lawyer Marcus Johnstone, Managing Director of PCD Solicitors, said: “The unfortunate reality is that crimes like these tend to be conducted by specific minority groups; just as white, middle class professionals are more likely to be involved in indecent images offences, grooming from takeaways and vape shops are more likely to be perpetrated by a small section of immigrants from Muslim countries.

“Addressing this straightforwardly has never been the government’s priority.

“This will inevitably have an effect on the beleaguered national grooming inquiry, which must conduct its work thoroughly but much more quickly.

“Vulnerable young people are still being groomed in towns and cities across the country, and are still being failed by the authorities.”