Action Against Business Crime – the umbrella body for business crime fighting – has a new name.
The Association of Business Crime Partnerships (ABCP) from June will be the merged AABC with the ‘business crime initiative’ of the Association of Town Centre Management (ATCM). To recap, the British Retail Consortium launched AABC, with nearly £1m of Home Office funding. It was based at the BRC offices in central London. The BRC cut ties with AABC in the winter of 2008-9. As featured last issue, it then looked as if – during a recession when business money for partnership working would be squeezed – rival bodies would compete in the business crime field. The ATCM’s Purple Flag scheme for instance seemed to overlap with the AABC Safer Socialising Award. As a sign of how the authorities want one national voice on business crime, the Association of Chief Police Officers and the Home Office will sit on the new body as observers. Lord Dear, AABC chairman, said: “One thing is for sure: the financial and commercial landscape will change [after the general election]; all of us, personally, professionally, are going to have very severe cuts and that will hit the high street, and the sort of work partnerships hope to do.” However he saw this as an opportunity, besides a challenge, ‘because clearly the police are going to be cut, the public sector is going to be cut. There is no way that any government can leave these alone. It will force many new ways of working.’ On the recent past, Lord Dear said the conference – at Manchester Airport’s Radisson Blu Hotel – was the first ‘once we broke the link with the BRC. The BRC in a sense was the parent body and we the child learning to walk … the split was entirely amicable; for the better for partnerships, because there was always this feeling with some people that because it was the BRC we were concentrating on retail.’ Although crime is falling, ‘and I don’t think it is playing around with figures’, Lord Dear pointed to ‘yobbery’ in town and city centres after 7pm. AABC is about to set up vocational training, distance learning, for business crime managers with the University of Central Lancashire and Kent Police. (This would bring not only academic recognition to business crime work, but mean managers and co-ordinators don’t have to re-invent the wheel, or learn from neighbouring partnerships or as they go along. As one manager admitted, without such training, ‘I’m winging it’.)
The next speaker, Allyn Thomas of Kent Police, ACPO’s man on business crime, appeared to offer proof of a greater role for crime partnerships in dealing with retail offenders.
Assistant Chief Constable Thomas referred to the December 2009 criticism by Citizens Advice Bureau of civil recovery companies. ACC Thomas said he had had meetings with one of the companies that do work for retailers, Retail Loss Prevention. He seemed to offer the prospect of ACPO accreditation of civil recovery firms. “It strikes me, if we accredit schemes and qualify the staff, then the world might operate like this: a retailer detains a young person for an offence of theft. At the moment there is a level of frustration – do they [retailers] ring police, do police attend, what is the outcome.’ ACC Thomas’ scenario continued with the partnership checking the caught youth’s history. The retailer, as a partnership scheme member, has ‘a range of options’: referring the person to restorative justice, ‘without necessarily having to go through the police. It may be referring the young person, even the adult, into a civil recovery programme.’ On a related topic, fixed penalty notices, ACC Thomas admitted that the government gets the fine, and the retailer gets nothing. What ACC Thomas outlined might allow the shopkeeper to recover costs, and satisfy human rights (as Citizens Advice demanded). However, such a scenario would appear to require one IT system, to check an offender’s background. Partnerships however have long used one of several software products, such as Hicom’s NBIS, Criisp from Cardinal Group, or Birmingham Retail Crime Operation’s ACIS. Mr Thomas warned of a need for progress on linking such IT systems, or else partnerships schemes on a local, regional and national basis would be undermined. ACC Thomas also pointed to a ‘missing strand’ in AABC work: call centres and commercial businesses (that is, non-retail). Among questions from the floor, John Whatling, Bexley’s partnership man (and an ex-copper) raised the lack of interest from police in business crime partnerships. Thomas could not disagree. He quoted an audit by the Co-op’s Andy Pope of business crime work, that found ‘islands of excellence and seas of apathy’. Thomas quoted a figure of 25 to 30 per cent of recorded crime as business crime of some sort. If that percentage was for domestic violence or crime against children, there would be an outcry, he suggested. Similarly, Thomas accepted a query from the floor about varied police information sharing agreements with partnerships, making work harder.
