You may have caught rumblings that following the recent attempt by the UK government to prevent children from accessing adult content, they are now looking at ways of extending this further.
The big problem with requiring providers of adult content to "age gate" their websites within the UK is that it's pretty trivial for anyone to appear as though they are not in the UK with the aid of a VPN. This fairly sizable loophole was pointed out by many at the time. The government is now looking at locking things down further and working out if there's ways to prevent VPN use as well.
Now, we know for a fact that many of you use VPNs daily to connect to your offices. And that's where any plan to "ban" VPNs will immediately fall down. A VPN is a VPN. There's no way to know what that VPN is being used for - that's half the point of them in some cases. You can't ban "bad" VPN use and allow "good" VPN use.
The government has already confirmed they're not looking at a full scale ban for exactly this reason. It seems likely instead that they'll try and force providers of consumer VPNs to "age gate" these in the same way they have attempted to for adult website.
While on the face of it this seems like a simple extension of the same attempted protections, doing something like this would carry very different risks. The current age gating may be effective for protecting children that accidentally ended up somewhere they shouldn't on the interet. However, if they are actively seeking that sort of thing out, that's a very different proposition. The fact they shouldn't be doing that isn't really a problem that technology can solve, and a tech-savvy teenager is going to be able to run rings round most adults if they need to. The big problem here is that the only companies that are going to comply with edicts like this are the "above board" ones. As you might expect, there's plenty of dark corners of the internet that have not and will never comply with requests like this. If someone wants to get at this stuff (adults included) and are being blocked by the "mainstream" providers without providing personal details, there is a very big risk that they're pushed towards far worse websites that don't care about UK law.
The government has suggested they will provide an update on this in July, although it's currently unclear if the recent political turmoil will delay any progress here.