Police officers seems to have almost entirely ceased punishing shoplifters despite multiple calls from retail sector to tackle record levels of retail crime, as stated in a recent report.
Recent government figures reveal that just 431 shoplifters were handed fixed penalty notices in the year to March — a 98 per cent drop from a decade ago when 19,419 were issued, The Times stated in a report, adding that the majority of police forces did not issue a single penalty for shoplifting over the last year.
More serious forms of punishment have also fallen sharply. The use of cautions to punish shoplifters has dropped from 16,281 in 2014 to just 2,077 in the last year, down 87 per cent. There has also been a decline in the number of shoplifters pursued through the courts, with just 28,955 convictions over the last year, compared with 71,998 a decade ago.
The number of shoplifting offences recorded by the police rose to 443,995 in the year to March 2024. This is a third higher than in the same period in 2014, when 326,440 offences were recorded — but led to significantly higher numbers being punished. The figures emerged from analysis by The Times using official figures from the Home Office, Ministry of Justice, and police forces.
The true scale of the crime is likely to be significantly higher as the vast majority of shoplifting offences are not recorded by the police or reported to them. Insiders fear the almost total lack of enforcement is encouraging further criminal behaviour, with thieves feeling as though they will never be held responsible for their offences.
Responding to the figures, Home secretary Yvette Cooper pledged to “end the shameful neglect” of shoplifting by the police as she described the crime as “an epidemic in our society”.
Cooper said, “We will remove the £200 threshold, bring in stronger powers to ban repeat offenders from town centres, make assaults on shop workers a specific criminal offence, and, through our neighbourhood policing guarantee, we will put thousands more police onto our streets to crack down on shop theft, antisocial behaviour and the other crimes that blight our communities and make people feel unsafe.
“We cannot end this problem overnight. But we can end the shameful neglect of this problem that has allowed it to become an epidemic in our society.”
She said she would use her Crime and Policing Bill to give the police stronger powers to ban repeat shoplifters from town centres. The legislation will also attempt to ensure that shoplifting offences are taken more seriously, by scrapping a rule introduced in 2014 that meant the police treated thefts of goods under £200 as a summary-only offence. The Home Office intended the move to increase the use of on-the-spot fines, but instead it led to a sharp decline in all forms of punishment.
