The Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper in her speech at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool in October spoke of an ‘epidemic of shoplifting and violence against shop workers’, writes Mark Rowe.
That was in response to increasingly vocal retailers such as Dame Sharon White of Waitrose seeking more response, and a more consistent response, from the authorities to reported crimes against retail.
Yvette Cooper went on to say: “A law brought in by the Tories means shop thefts under £200 aren’t investigated even if the same gang comes back time and again. So Conference, we will end the £200 rule to tackle the shoplifting gangs.”
The ‘£200 rule’ was in evidence last week on the Channel 5 documentary Shoplifters and Scammers: At war with the law, when meat thieves were detained at a M&S store in London. The first step in dealing with the criminals was to tot up the value of goods taken; if it was below £200, police would not be called, because they would not be interested. The theft came indeed to £140-odd (still, a considerable amount of meat, and any retailer who had that amount stolen would not only lose it, but would have to sell an amount to make good the loss – hence higher prices for law-abiding shoppers). The thieves instead were offered a choice of paying for what they had taken and (after one of the thieves, under escort, was let outside to make calls in vain to rustle up more cash) duly gave £90-odd. The entire hour’s documentary showed how seldom such crime against businesses ever reaches the criminal justice system.
Quite apart from the authorities not paying attention to ‘shoplifting gangs’ – how can police investigate, when they take in no details of the thieves’ deeds? – we can agree then the threat to the ‘social contract’ as Dame Sharon White put it last month when speaking at an event by the think-tank Policy Exchange; that there appears to be no consequences for wrong-doing. But a ‘law brought in by the Tories’?
The Daily Telegraph columnist Philip Johnston in 2010 published Bad Laws: sub-titled ‘an explosive analysis of Britain’s madcap rules, health and safety lunacies and madcap laws’. From page 105 he deplored the ‘rise of summary justice’:
‘If you were in a shop and watched the person standing next to you take a £200 suit, or dress, from a clothes rail, stuff it in a bag and walk out of the door, would you regard that as a minor offence? I suspect most of us believe the individual should be taken to the police station and charged with theft, later to appear before magistrates and punished, usually by way of a hefty fine. Theft has always been seen as a serious crime ….‘
Yet since 2004, a shoplifter who purloins property worth £200 or less is not normally arrested and tried by given a fixed penalty notice of £80; in other words, they are treated in the same way as a motorist whose car has remained too long in a parking space ….
Johnston went on to query if fines are paid at all, and pointed out that ‘on the spot’ fines were meant as punishment for anti-social behaviour (and Johnston had much more to say about Labour’s anti-social behaviour orders, ASBOs for short). He wrote further:
‘Police are told that if the value of the stolen property is under £200 or the cost of criminal damage is less than £500 then a fixed-penalty notice should be issued. The first obvious flaw with such a penalty is that it is no deterrent, which is one of the foundations of the punishment system. If anything, it is an incentive …. Exasperated retailers say there is no deterrent to shoplifting because so few are prosecuted anyway …. Shoplifters dealt with by way of an on-the-spot fine avoid any criminal record, which is a bit odd given that the offence exposes a predisposition towards dishonesty …. Persistent shoplifters, says the Home Office, are arrested and tried; but if they carry out a series of thefts in different police force areas, and each time receive a fixed penalty notice, how is their pattern of behaviour going to be noticed? …. We are witnessing the decriminalisation of crime, not least because so many offenders do not pay the fines.‘
What to say about this sad state, arising not under the Tories but the second term of Labour government under Tony Blair, that Yvette Cooper, an MP since 1997, should be familiar with? First, the non-party-political nature of the shortcoming; in the 13 years of Coalition and then solely Conservative government, the decriminalisation of theft from shops remains, and in the summer we had the spectacle of the Home Secretary Suella Braverman presenting it as a triumph that police chiefs agreed to pursue any ‘reasonable line of inquiry’ (that police would define). When prisons are full and courts backlogged, where is the spare capacity (and police with the investigative skills to go after ‘gangs’) coming from, to deal with extra criminals if they were no longer given fines at most?
Second, Johnston was correct to notice the ‘predisposition towards dishonesty’; those doing business crime reduction partnership (BCRP) work will say that at least some organised retail thieves carry out other crimes: exploitation of children, people smuggling. Crimes not swept under any carpets by way of fines.
Third, is the ‘£200 rule’ bad, ‘imposed by the nanny state’, an enemy of common sense, the thrust of Johnston’s book? Grenfell Tower burnt in 2017 and 72 people died because of a lack of application of health and safety; the ‘£200 rule’ is not necessarily bad. It depends on the application. No-one reasonable would object to a youth or an otherwise first-time shoplifter being dealt with by a fine rather than taken through the criminal justice system (although without a logging of all crimes, how is anyone to know if someone caught is truly a first-timer?). The recent National Association of Business Crime Partnership (NABCP) conference in London heard, and the December print edition of Professional Security Magazine will feature, how Brighton BCRP has sought to involve youth services to divert young people spotted in time away from crime, prison and a likely early violent death. The problem is not solely the police’s; supermarkets, having brought in self-service checkouts and denuded their shops of staff, are routinely running after thieves, taking the stolen property off the thief, and returning to store with it, not even troubling to make a record. Dame Sharon White’s social contract ought to apply to retailers also.
Blanket use of the ‘£200 rule’ to avoid strain on the creaky criminal justice system is the fault, best tackled by police giving attention to every case. What’s troubling for the near future, if Labour takes power in a 2024 general election as seems likely, is that the Shadow Home Secretary doesn’t have enough grasp of her subject to know which wicked government has done what.
