Policing Minister vows to bring tough measures to crackdown on retail crime

The Policing Minister Diana Johnson has vowed to crackdown on rising retail crime with tough new measures including six months jail time for assault on shopworkers, reversal of the "Shoplifters’ Charter" and £5 million investment to crack down on organised shoplifting gangs.

Speaking at the Cooperative Party’s Retail Crime Summit in London today (12), Johnson said, “there is no place for anyone who abuses shopworkers, and we are changing the law to come after” perpetrators and declare that the “era of criminals acting with impunity” is over.

Johnson said the current government is to remove the 2014 shoplifting legislation, which makes shop theft involving property with a value of £200 or less a summary-only offence. Shoplifters’ Charter, that was introduced in 2014, brought in to describe the theft of goods worth under £200, meaning the police would not routinely investigate crimes below this threshold.

An extra £5 million will be invested over three years to crack down on organised shoplifting gangs, funding a specialist analysis team within the National Policing Unit for serious Organised Acquisitive Crime. That project is already making an impact with 152 prolific people involved in organised retail crime identified in its first three months. An additional £2 million over three years will also be spent in the National Business Crime Centre, providing a vital resource for both police and businesses to learn, share and support each other to prevent and combat crime.

Labour will legislate for assaults against retail workers a new stand-alone offence, as it has called for over the last decade.

Additionally, the Labour government will put policing back into town centres, high streets, and communities. It will restore guaranteed patrols in retail crime hotspots and mean shopkeepers and retail staff have a named officer to turn to when nuisance comes calling.

Shoplifting reached a record high in the year to June, with 469,788 offences reported to police—a nearly 29 percent increase from last year’s 365,173 incidents.

According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), this is double the rate seen in 2020 during the pandemic, averaging over 9,000 offences a week, 1,290 a day, or more than two per minute, based on typical UK store hours of 10 hours per day. These figures mark the highest levels since records began in March 2003, with retailers warning that the crisis now adds at least 6p to each customer transaction.

British Retail Consortium estimates that £1.8 billion worth of items are stolen each year, with a further £700 million spent on extra security.