Crime is at its highest point ever, the Home Affairs Select Committee has heard from witnesses to its inquiry on violence and abuse against retail workers.
That came from Paul Gerrard, public affairs director at The Co-op, referring to the retailer’s 2,500 stores across the UK. Abuse and threats to staff are also at their highest ever, he told the committee of MPs on Wednesday, April 17. As he set out, the violence can appear senseless; can be racial; and can include staff being followed home: “We have had to move colleagues from their homes because of threats made to them.” Violence comes with thieves stealing to re-sell, he added. The committee chair Dame Diana Johnson, a Labour MP for Hull, answered that while on a visit to a Co-op in her constituency, a man stole from a fridge (‘He put it all into a bag and left’). Mr Gerrard quoted from recent research for the Co-op by the criminologist Prof Emmeline Taylor, adding ‘in the main, the people who are stealing from our shops in volume are selling it on’.
Lyndsey Cambridge, who leads a crime forum at the Federation of Wholesale Distributors, who supply and run convenience stores, stressed how organised crime was targeting its members’ warehouses, and lorries transporting the likes of tobacco, high-end spirits and vapes. Thefts might amount to £20k or £30k at a time, and police gave ‘a woeful response’.
Similarly Ed Woodall, government relations director at the trade body the Association of Convenience Stores (ASC), told the committee that ‘violence and abuse against shop workers has increased’. He spoke of ‘prolific offenders who often have addiction issues’, and stressed the localness of such theft by addicts, ‘two to three-people crime waves, which are known to the retailer, the police and the community, but are not being dealt with appropriately and properly’. And Joanne Cairns, Head of Research and Policy, at the retail trade union Usdaw, stressed members’ safety. She mentioned that shoplifting where value of goods are under £200 is treated as a summary offence, ‘and that has driven a lack of police response and prosecutions’.
As for how retailers are protecting their shops, Mr Gerrard told MPs: “We continue to spend three or four times the sector average per store on security. We have introduced body-worn cameras on much more of our estate. We have increased the use of what we call tactical guarding, which is undercover guarding by people who go in and detain offenders in the act and call for police support.” As for the police, Mr Gerrard gave the example of a store that rang because of an armed robbery who ‘was told to ring 101, the non-emergency number’.
A dilemma for the guarding sector and retailers alike has been whether or how physical to get with violent offenders, which could lead to further violence. As for the Co-op, Mr Gerrard said that ‘we tell our colleagues not to intervene if they are going to put themselves in danger, and the same applies to the security guards’. He gave the example of a Co-op in Lancing in Sussex that reported 1,000 incidents in 2023 but was not getting a police response: “When our security guard intervened with some youth offenders, the guard was attacked. They detained a youth offender and called for police support. The police didn’t turn up on time, but the youth offender’s family did, and they proceeded to give the guard a good kicking before the police arrived.” He added that Sussex Police are ‘normally really good on retail crime’ and that when police did intervene there, ‘the problem stopped within months’. More generally, Mr Gerrard stressed the need for police to ‘do their bit’. Tim Laughton the Conservative MP for West Sussex who sits on the committee – whose constituency includes Lancing – pressed Mr Gerrard about Co-op policy, contrasting it to supermarkets whose security guards physically prevent known thieves from entering and will eject trouble-makers, making, Mr Laughton said, the Co-op ‘the go-to store for shoplifters and trouble-makers’. The two got into a dispute, Mr Gerrard taking issue that big supermarkets could be compared with convenience stores like the Co-op’s.
As for the recent announcement trumpeted by the Government that assault on a retailer worker would become a separate crime, Lyndsey Cambridge for the wholesale trade feared that if such a law did not cover wholesale, there would be ‘a displacement of crime from the high street …. to industrial estates and big cash and carry warehouses’.
The Conservative MP for Barrow in Furness, Simon Fell, likewise spoke of visiting Co-ops in his Cumbria constituency and related that ‘offences happen, but there is not the police response to back them up’. On the question of why (as Mr Gerrard stated) police in Scotland are attending in-store crimes more since Scotland passed a law making assault of retail workers a stand-alone offence, Mr Gerrard explained it by ‘prioritisation of retail crime has improved’ among Police Scotland; put another way, that the new law ‘has probably focused minds’.
The Conservative MP for Dudley in the West Midlands, Marco Longhi, spoke of similarly hearing from retail in his constituency that theft from shops, whether supermarkets or convenience stores like the Co-op, because the thieves knew they could get away with it, and waited for delivery of high-value goods and when fewer customers (who might intervene) were around. Hence he described it as a policing issue, and that the criminals were ‘pushing boundaries’. Mr Gerrard agreed it was ‘fixable’.
The second half of the committee’s morning was given over to hearing from the police: Supt Patrick Holdaway, of the National Business Crime Centre (NBCC); Chief Supt Alex Goss, who leads nationally on retail crime; and North Wales Chief Constable Amanda Blakeman, who leads nationally on acquisitive crime. Mr Gerrard for the Co-op already stressed that ‘things have changed since the retail crime action plan’ published in autumn 2023. Blakeman opened for the three by stressing the police’s work since the plan, while pointing out that ‘policing is pulled in many different ways’. Police response to stores was improved, she said, adding that ten (unnamed) police forces attended ‘100 per cent for offenders who are violent in relation to shop workers’. Just as earlier witnesses had raised the point that police forces were not consistent in their response, so Blakeman admitted that while some forces were doing excellent work around their business crime partnerships, ‘that is not across the board’. She touched on more violence and incivility against front-facing workers more generally, such as against receptionists in GP surgeries; ‘a lack of tolerance across communities broadly’. She pointed out that police were not refusing to attend businesses, but rather ‘other issues are taking their time’. She mentioned also the policy set last year of ‘Right Care, Right Person’ whereby police will not attend to someone if it is properly a case for mental health care.
When Dame Diana Johnson as committee chair raised how some shop thieves are drug addicts, Blakeman spoke of a ‘lack of availability’ of referral services for addicts to get treatment. On Project Pegasus, and its use of retrospective facial recognition, she stressed police awarenesss of mistrust around its use. As for the stand-alone offence for assault of retail workers proposed for England and Wales, Blakeman (a return witness to the committee) reiterated that she doesn’t see a need for it. In reply to a question by Bury Conservative MP James Daly, Blakeman agreed as Daly put it that ‘the vast majority of this type of offending is carried out by people known to the police’.
Supt Holdaway told the committee that most (55pc) of shop thefts are ‘closed’ by police, with no known suspect, usually for lack of CCTV. Police want it sent to them electronically; ‘we need to get away from police officers turning up and trying to get a USB pen and a disc that we then cannot view’. On the need for police to be told by businesses about prolific offenders, Mr Holdaway said that an offender might be prosecuted for six or seven offences when they might have 50 or 60: “When that goes to court that makes a significant difference,” as at court they might get a three-month prison sentence ‘but be out in six weeks’.
Chief Supt Goss spoke about ‘very much a multi-faceted, partnership approach’ by police with businesses. While he agreed that police ‘have definitely got to improve with their attendance at the scene of a detained retail offender, and where violence has been offered or used’, he argued also for crime prevention, banning known offenders from stores, or the guard on the front door asking them not to come in. As for retailers having a non-detain policy even of known, prolific thieves, Mr Goss aired a potential ‘enhanced level of training’, and ‘extra powers’, for shop guards about detaining of offenders. As a sign of how difficult, and tense, detaining of a thief can be for a shop, and how shop staff are unsure about what they can do, Mr Goss said: “I certainly cannot put a time limit on how long people can be held for, because it is very dependent on what has happened, the circumstance and the offender.” Mr Goss said that police are ‘in the process of writing a national strategy for retail crime’. As a sign of lack of funding around business crime more generally, Mr Holdaway said that the NBCC had two (an inspector paid for by the Met Police, who’s left); now ‘there is one of us’. As part of the winding up of the session, Mr Holdaway pointed to the wider criminal justice system, whereby even a prolific offender might get a suspended prison sentence and hence walk the street, which reflected badly on policing, yet there was ‘nothing more frustrating for police and for retailers’.
On Pegasus, Blakeman said it begins properly in May: “We have not just waited for that go date; we have already started work and we have a couple of jobs that we are working on now, which demonstrate some good return on value. I cannot go into the specifics of course, but we are seeing the ability to track offenders from the bottom of the country to the top of the country,” and Pegasus would then prepare a ‘package’, a case for a local police force to pick up.
The transcript of the evidence hearing is at – https://committees.parliament.uk/event/21153/formal-meeting-oral-evidence-session/.
