Retail Crime: Effects

Thursday 5th December 2024 Lords Chamber

Motion to Take Note

17:20

Moved by

[Lord Hannett of Everton]

That this House takes note of retail crime and its effect on workers, the community and local economies.

[Lord Hannett of Everton (Lab)]

My Lords, before I really begin this debate, let me say how impressed I have been today with some of the contributions on subjects such as stalking and homelessness.

To turn to my debate, I am so pleased to have the opportunity to debate what I believe is an extremely important issue. This is a welcome opportunity to draw attention to the important issue of retail crime. When I talk of retail crime, I am talking about the individuals who are on the receiving end of it. It is an issue that blights our high streets, towns and cities, right across the country. It affects all of us and our communities. Above all, it affects the people who work in retail—often low-paid workers, who are left feeling vulnerable and unsafe in the workplace.

USDAW’S Freedom From Fear campaign has been running since 2003. In my previous role, I introduced this campaign. It sounds a very stark title; after all, we are not in a war zone. However, I tell noble Lords that many of our members said that, on occasions, as a result of the verbal and physical abuse, it felt like it. The campaign has gathered support from across the retail industry and there have been calls for action from the Co-operative Party and the British Retail Consortium. It is not an “us and them” campaign. Employers do not want their employees abused and have therefore worked very closely with my union over many years. The campaign has made huge strides over the past three years. I place on record the work that my successor, Paddy Lillis, and the executive have done. Just as important are those union representatives who are at the coalface dealing with this issue on a daily basis.

In August 2021, a new ground-breaking law was introduced in Scotland to protect shopworkers from violence, threats and abuse. The abuse can be extremely cutting if you are on the receiving end of some of the comments made over many years. It is testament to the importance of this debate that the campaign was launched in 2003, and I have spoken on it in many countries as UNI commerce president, because retail crime does not recognise international borders.

Changes to sentencing guidelines were also introduced in England and Wales, but these did not get anywhere near what was needed or the measures introduced in Scotland. The situation on the ground has continued to go from bad to worse. We have seen a huge increase in retail crime from organised gangs driving incidents of abuse, threats and violence against retail staff. We must remember that we are talking about a workplace—not a town centre or a public house. This is inside stores. It is obviously right that they welcome people in but, sometimes, they also attract those who feel that they have a right to speak to retail staff in a completely unacceptable way.

According to figures from the ONS, in the year to October 2024, nearly 470,000 offences were recorded by police forces across England and Wales, a 29% increase and the highest figure since records started in March 2003. However, the reality is that under-reporting hides an even worse situation. We know that many retail workers do not report incidents, because they simply do not believe that anything will happen when they do. The British Retail Consortium survey showed that there were more than 1,300 incidents of violence and abuse against retail workers every day in 2022 and 2023. Only one-third of those incidents were reported to police and less than 8% resulted in a prosecution. USDAW’s latest survey of its members found that seven out of 10 have been verbally abused in the past year; 46% were threatened, and 18% were physically assaulted during the year. Theft was the trigger for 61% of incidents in 2023, and this, coupled with record levels of retail crime, is now driving a huge number of incidents.

Of course, numbers roll off a page very easily, but we should remember that behind the statistics are real people. Their responsibility is to go to work and feel safe, and abuse should never be part of the job. Some of the comments that USDAW members made in response to the survey told stories that are harrowing. In fact, I know from my past experience that we have had people who have been physically abused not once or twice but on a number of occasions and have never returned to their employment, because they could not face the idea that the situation might occur again. One said, “A shoplifter grabbed my arm, bruised it”. Another said, “As I was leaving work, I was confronted by a man who came straight to me and physically hit me without any reason or motive”. That person lived in the same community as the shop worker. Another told of homophobic comments and “Threats to hurt me because I refused a sale”. One retail worker said she had been threatened and faced attempted assault just for note-checking, when there was a disagreement over what had been said.

I believe that this is the tip of the iceberg. It is unacceptable that retail workers, who do such essential jobs in our communities, are having to face this on a daily basis. I remember their work and the contribution that they, like all front-facing staff, made during the pandemic to support us as consumers. The anxiety caused by having to return to the workplace where you were actually attacked, threatened or abused, and wondering whether it will happen again, is absolutely horrendous. Many retail workers live in the communities they serve, so they can feel unsafe in their homes and local area. This is an important point. We have had examples of people being followed home and threatened. This fear and anxiety can ruin workers’ lives, and it needs to be challenged and stopped. That is why it is very encouraging that the Government are going to introduce a new stand-alone offence of assaulting a retail worker. I want to place on record my thanks to my noble friend Lord Hanson, not just for the work he has done here on this matter but for his work in the other House, where he supported our campaigns—it goes back many years.

Legislation to make this a special offence will send a strong message that violence against retail workers will not be tolerated. It will help police forces to target resources and improve reporting and recording procedures. It is important that the Government bring this legislation forward and that it is comprehensive in its coverage. We have to start somewhere. The situation in Scotland is different, but I am so pleased that this Government have taken this matter seriously. Where they could go further, of course, is looking at the Scottish law to see whether they can move towards the same outcome. A key step forward will be the removal of the £200 threshold for prosecuting shoplifters. That threshold has effectively become an open invitation to retail criminals, and it is vital that is removed as soon as possible.

Additional funding in relation to retail crime was announced in the Autumn Budget, including £5 million over three years to continue funding the national policing intelligence unit, Opal, to combat organised gangs targeting retailers; £2 million over three years to the National Business Crime Centre, to support police and businesses in preventing and tackling crime; £100,000 in 2025-2026 to the National Police Chiefs’ Council, for further training on crime prevention. All this is very welcome and a sign of the importance that the Government are placing on tackling retail crime.

The inquiry by the House of Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee is also very timely and welcome. Its report makes 15 recommendations, all of which are carefully considered and are useful contributions to the policy debate on this important issue. Its recommendations acknowledge the work that the Government are already doing in this area, including the stand-alone offence and the removal of the £200 threshold. The report also, of course, focuses on rehabilitation. We know that many of those stealing from shops and attacking retail workers are repeat offenders. Often, drugs and alcohol are involved, and the cost of living crisis has, to some extent, made the situation even more of problem. These are different reasons, but nevertheless important.

It is essential that there is proper investment in treatment and prevention measures to tackle this problem effectively. The importance of good data collection and sharing is also highlighted in the report, which calls for a retail flag system to be set up. It highlights the need for legislation to ensure that crime prevention technologies, such as facial recognition, are used ethically. It also recommends regulations are introduced to prevent the selling of stolen goods online. Another key recommendation is that a public information campaign should highlight the impact of shop theft.

It also talks about the importance of the language used on the issue. The term “shoplifting” does not reflect the serious nature of these incidents—after all, these are real people going to work. Sometimes the image of retail is that it is not as important as many other industries; it is, and these people do real, valued work, on which we all depend. The new Government have already shown that they take retail jobs seriously, value retail work and stand with retail workers. That proves that the long campaign since 2003 is now beginning to deliver outcomes.

We need to ensure that the legislation is passed as quickly as possible, with the most comprehensive application, and that the right policing resources are put in place to enforce it. I am impressed that there are going to be more police on the streets, which I hope will turn the view that retail crime is not really as important as some other crimes, because it is. We need better co-ordination between the police and retailers, ensuring that these hardened career criminals can no longer leave retail workers living in fear. We will not be able to fix the issue overnight, but we need to act urgently. The recommendation in the committee’s report recognised the scale of the problem and the need for serious action. The introduction of the stand-alone offence is a huge milestone and, alongside the other recommendations, it will make a real difference in keeping retail workers safe. Violence and abuse are not parts of the job.

I hope that all the speakers who put their names down will contribute in a positive way to the debate. More importantly, to have this on the record gives a real boost to retail workers, allowing them to see that this is taken seriously in both Houses.

17:34

[Lord Kirkham (Con)]

My Lords, I begin by declaring an interest as a retailer. I started work at 16 as a shop assistant, in 1969 founded the business that would become DFS furniture, and more recently served for a time as director of the retailer Iceland Foods.

DFS is fortunate that it is quite difficult to steal a sofa from a store display. However, it is a very different story at Iceland Foods and at every other retailer operating in our high streets, out-of-town retail parks and shopping centres. Shop theft has become a plague affecting every shopkeeper in the land—and I am not alluding here to hungry individuals stealing food for the family or children cheekily pocketing a bag of sweets. I mean organised and violent criminals who go into stores equipped to clear their shelves of high-value items and will not hesitate to use threats and violence against anyone who gets in their way.

We know from the excellent Justice and Home Affairs Committee letter last month that there are currently nearly 17 million incidents a year of shop theft across the country. In its last financial year alone, Iceland Foods—the smallest of our national food retailers—recorded 1,000 violent incidents involving store staff who were threatened and attacked with weapons, including hammers, screwdrivers, knives, hypodermic needles and even firearms. No one should have to go to work feeling frightened, knowing that they might face abuse and assault in the course of their day.

The police are overstretched, and too often they are unable to attend stores when they are called. Security guards are legally constrained: they are shackled in their inability to search or detain offenders before the police arrive, and thieves always seem well informed of their legal rights. Where prosecutions ensue, the punishments handed down seem to offer little deterrent.

Even more bizarrely, the state seems determined to obstruct efforts by retailers to protect themselves. The Information Commissioner’s Office “condemns” the sharing of photos of known shoplifters among retailers on WhatsApp groups, apparently placing the “criminal’s right to privacy” above the safety of store workers. As retailers look to take advantage of new technology to deploy live facial recognition to identify and deter thieves, they are warned that they are moving into an “Orwellian dystopia” where Big Brother is watching you. While it is simplistic to declare, “If you’ve nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to fear”, retailers are entirely correct to prioritise the safety of their staff and customers above the right to privacy of the criminals, as indeed the chairman of Iceland Foods, Richard Walker, has pledged to do—because this is a crime, not a minor misdemeanour, and it is certainly not a victimless offence.

Ultimately, we all pay for retail theft, do we not? We pay in the higher prices that shops have to charge to cover the cost, not just of the goods that are stolen but of the CCTV systems, the alarms and the security guards. We pay for the NHS treatment of shop workers who have been physically injured by thieves, or of those whose mental health has been damaged by the trauma they have suffered. We pay too in the degradation of the retail environment. Who wants to shop in stores where legs of lamb or bottles of spirit have to be tagged, security boxed or locked in cabinets or refrigerators that can then be accessed only with the help of staff, or to run the risk of becoming collateral damage as a gang runs amok clearing goods off shelves? Shopping should be a safe and pleasurable experience whether you are looking to buy luxury goods, gifts from Mayfair galleries or something for the family’s tea on the high street of a northern town.

Organised, aggressive and violent threat theft is intimidating customers, deterring shoppers, destroying community cohesion and making some of our high streets no-go zones for law-abiding families. There can be no hope of high street revival and the associated opportunities for economic growth unless and until the crime wave is decisively addressed. As the Justice and Home Affairs Committee recommended and the noble Lord, Lord Hannett, commented, we should sweep away what is in effect the decriminalisation of thefts valued at less than £200.

The promise to make assaults on shop workers a specific criminal offence is a welcome gesture, and I am glad that the Government have pledged to enact this measure that was proposed by the Conservatives in April. But until that is done, it is important to recognise that assault is already a crime, and we should ensure that the existing law is enforced with rigour.

We should give the police the resources to respond to the thefts from shops and give the criminal justice system the resources to prosecute offenders and punish them appropriately. We should reinforce the teaching of citizenship in our schools so that children develop an appropriate respect for the property of others and for civility at all times. We should teach them that crime does not and cannot pay.

We should crack down on the social media companies that make it all too easy for professional thieves to resell stolen goods and on the venues that facilitate it. With a couple of clicks of a mouse, stolen property can appear on offer to millions through Facebook Marketplace within minutes of its theft.

Let us please stop putting regulatory hurdles in the way of retailers who want only to protect their store, staff and customers, keep prices down, and ensure that they are not driven out of business. Give retailers’ security guards the legal powers they need to be effective. Most definitely lift the ban on sharing images of known thieves and ensure that facial recognition technology is permitted—with safeguards, of course. Let us not rule it out on the basis that it is an affront to criminals’ right to privacy.

Talk of retailers potentially being driven out of business is certainly not overdramatic. I know at first hand British retail businesses whose losses from shop theft and the cost of trying to prevent it considerably exceed their annual profits.

We evidently have a Government of change and the October Budget clearly indicated that we can act quickly and decisively when we want to. It would not be premature on this occasion to act quickly to halt this horrific wave of criminality that is undermining our town centres and threatening our society. I thank noble Lords for their tolerance.

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

My Lords, there is limited time in the debate. There is a set time of two hours, so I ask noble Lords to please stick to the time limit.

17:42

[Lord Tope (LD)]

My Lords, I hope that does not come off my time. I begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Hannett, for introducing this important and timely debate. I declare my interest as a member of the Justice and Home Affairs Committee, chaired by my noble friend Lord Foster of Bath, who is very sorry that he cannot be here tonight. I am not in any way his substitute, as he will be pleased to know I have made clear.

Immediately after the general election, the committee conducted a short inquiry into what was initially termed “shoplifting”. In November, the committee wrote to the Minister for Policing, Fire and Crime Prevention with our conclusions and some recommendations. The Minister’s reply to the committee was received last week.

This debate is not specifically about the committee’s report and I do not speak on behalf of the committee in it. I shall leave the Minister to give the Government’s response as he sees fit when he responds to this debate. However, my comments today inevitably are based largely on what I learned during that inquiry, to which reference has so far been made by both previous speakers. I will try not to repeat too much of what they have already said.

The first point that particularly hit us in the inquiry was after our first evidence session, when it was the immediate and unanimous view of the committee that it must change the title to “shop theft”. We felt that was more important than might perhaps first be believed. The term “shoplifting” seemed to trivialise the crime and give the impression that it was relatively harmless and victimless. As the noble Lord, Lord Hannett, has rightly made very clear to us, it is anything but victimless. The victims are on the front lines in the shops. Whether it is fair or not, the widely held belief that the police do not take this issue too seriously simply enhances that impression.

The committee’s first recommendation, which I strongly endorse, is that “shop theft” should replace “shoplifting” wherever possible. Its regular use in everyday language by local and national government, the police and the media—and, not least, the retail trade itself—will go some way to reinforcing its serious nature. Over what I believe will be a surprisingly short time, everyday language will start to change, and with it will come the recognition that we are talking about something very serious indeed—not just kids nicking a few sweets from the local sweet shop. We can make a start on that in this debate. In her response to the committee, the Minister committed to using the expression “shop theft” when appropriate. When the Minister replies, can he give us an indication of what the Government consider “appropriate” and, rather more particularly, when its use would be inappropriate?

This morning, I spoke to one of our local Members of Parliament. He told me that, in his south London suburban constituency, shop theft is the issue most often raised with him, after housing. It is widely accepted that shop theft is greatly underreported, often because victims do not believe that the police will be able to do anything about it. My MP colleague told me that there are two large, well-known supermarkets next to each other on the main shopping street in his constituency. One reports all incidents of shop theft to the police, while the one next door reports such incidents only to its head office.

Reliably accurate figures are hard to agree, and I suspect that we will hear a number of different figures today. The figures reported to our committee are that, in the year to March 2024, 443,995 incidents of shop theft were recorded by the police, a 30% increase on the previous year. However, evidence to the committee suggested that that was a “drop in the ocean” compared to the likely real figures. We were told that the real figure was more in the region of 17 million incidents a year, with a cost to the retailer of around £2 billion—and rising fast. Can the Minister tell us what steps are being taken to achieve better and more accurate reporting and recording of shop theft incidents?

Clearly, we are not talking about petty pilfering—nicking from the local sweet shop, for instance; this is serious organised crime and needs to be dealt with as such. The committee learned about Pegasus, a new partnership between retailers and the police aimed at building up a better picture of the organised criminal networks involved in retail crime. I very much welcome this partnership working and would like to see it extended to include local authorities. But Pegasus is seriously inhibited by its definition of “organised crime” as that

“which operates across two or more police force areas”,

meaning that it excludes all activity and information at a more local level. As a former local authority council leader, I believe that it is at the local level where we begin to start tackling these issues. Perhaps the Minister can tell us who is responsible for that definition. I do not know whether it is the Government or the police, as I suspect it is. More particularly, who can get it changed?

Clearly, there must be a market to dispose of such a volume of stolen goods, and much of that is in online sales. The committee recommended that the Government introduce regulations to make it more difficult to sell goods anonymously in an online marketplace. Can the Minister tell us what steps the Government are taking to crack down on that? Shop theft is clearly now a very serious problem that is hugely damaging to retailers, shop workers, the general public and the economy. All the evidence shows that it is increasing rapidly. We all look forward to hearing from the Minister how the Government are tackling it.

17:49

[Baroness Hazarika (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my good friend the noble Lord, Lord Hannett of Everton, for organising this important debate. He brings great wisdom and experience, having represented shop workers over many decades, and is one of our most respected trade union leaders at USDAW. I also look forward to hearing from my noble friend Lord Monks.

The timing of this debate is highly apt and very personal to me because, on Monday evening, I popped into my local shop in Lambeth, south London, to pick up some groceries. A very aggressive man barged in, pushed past a queue of customers, marched up to the alcohol aisle by the till and grabbed two bottles of spirits. The poor security guard tried to stop him. The shoplifter then turned very aggressive and threatened not only the member of staff but everyone around him. The whole shop froze with fear and the guy simply walked out. It was genuinely incredible to witness. Everyone in the shop was very shaken up by this, and I spoke to the security guard and asked if he was okay. He told me that this happens all the time. He fears for his safety and that of the customers, especially when there are mums with young kids in doing their shopping. He also told me that this guy was a serial offender; he comes in a couple of times a week, sometimes even a couple of times a day. He is a violent menace, and yet nobody does anything.

The shocking thing is that everybody knows who this person is. The evidence is there, and yet nothing happens. The police do not take it seriously and employers do not know what to do. The security guard cares deeply, but he does not want to risk life and limb. The worst thing is that this is the new normal. Let that sink in: we now live in a society where we teach our children about rules and laws, yet they see people saunter into a shop, fill their boots, threaten violence and walk out scot free. In what world is that okay?

There will be some who argue that this kind of crime is just low level. I could not disagree more. Shoplifting is not trivial in any way; it is theft. It is often the canary down the coal mine, which tells us an interesting story about where society is. We all know that sky-high shoplifting goes hand in hand with anti-social behaviour—litter, street harassment, aggressive begging, mugging, phone theft, drug dealing, violence, particularly against women and girls on the street, and the rest. Anti-social behaviour is blighting so many of our communities and causing so much misery.

I am part of a local community group in the Brixton area where I live called Action on ASB!, and I can tell you that local residents are distressed and fed up with it. Not only is it horrible to live in an area where you and your kids feel frightened; it causes huge damage to the local economy. I will quote the Brixton business improvement district, known as BID, which represents more than 500 local members. It says that the Brixton economy is worth £2 billion annually, which is a third of the whole Lambeth economy, so it is important. Movement data shows a considerable fall in footfall—in some cases as much as 25% compared to the previous year. The BID argues that personal safety, crime and anti-social behaviour is a key reason why people are staying away from the local area, and cites shoplifting and verbal and physical abuse against workers as a major problem.

Retail crime, along with anti-social behaviour, has reached an unsustainable level in Brixton and it is affecting people’s quality of life. But this is not just in Brixton and Lambeth; it is happening all over the country, and it can have devastating consequences.

A much-loved local business owner and good friend of mine, who owns a second-hand shop, had a terrible experience recently. As he was closing up one night, he was attacked and beaten so badly that he has now lost his sight in one eye. His life was saved only by a passer-by who made an intervention. So I say again to anyone who challenges me: retail crime is not low-level crime. It is intrinsically connected to more serious crime, and it is time we took it seriously.

We need more police, and I strongly welcome the announcement today of 13,000 more officers, but we need those police to take this more seriously and actually turn up. We also need to prosecute and punish this crime. There are often a small number of hardened criminals who are responsible for terrorising local shops and are known in the area. As the noble Lord, Lord Kirkham, argued, let us target them using technology such as facial recognition.

We also need to acknowledge that alcohol and drug addiction, homelessness, prostitution and mental health issues contribute to this kind of behaviour, so we need a joined-up approach that brings together local authorities and police, along with other key agencies from public health and housing.

Above all, we need real leadership on this from our politicians, national and local, and from our police. We should not just surrender our local high streets to a Wild West where shop workers, residents and customers are subjected to theft, intimidation and violence on a daily, sometimes even an hourly, basis. The toll on them is not just physically but psychologically immense, and it is harming the wider economy.

There is also a moral question here: what kind of society do we want to live in? We once prided ourselves as a nation of shopkeepers. The local shop and convenience store make up the fabric of our communities —it is where we see our friends and our neighbours—but their owners and workers should not feel like they are living in a war zone, as the noble Lord, Lord Hannett, so eloquently describes. It is time to get tough on retail crime and make our shops and streets safer for everyone.

17:56

[Lord Monks (Lab)]

I add my congratulations to my noble and long-standing friend Lord Hannett of Everton on securing this important debate. As the noble Baroness, Lady Hazarika, has just said, my noble friend Lord Hannett was a distinguished and highly effective general secretary of USDAW, the shop and other workers’ union. USDAW has long been engaged in this campaign to secure more protection for retail workers, and I am very pleased that this campaign is now coming to fruition and success. It is evident that my noble friend Lord Hannett will continue henceforth to be a champion of retail workers in this House, and we look forward to that.

That will be really needed because, as others have said, violence in the retail sector and in some communities is increasingly endemic. My noble friend Lord Hannett quoted some of the terrifying statistics, and I will just pick out two that shocked me when I prepared for this debate. In the year before the election, street theft soared by 40% and shop theft by 29%. Anti-social behaviour reached new heights in our towns and cities.

What kind of country are we living in? It is a country where too often, I am afraid, gangs rule the roost, drugs are a major feature of local communities and the economy, and there is an avalanche of shop theft, with vulnerable staff being subject to intolerable levels of abuse and violence. Even people living in comfortable neighbourhoods are aware of the problem: 36% of people in England and Wales have experienced or witnessed some anti-social behaviour in their communities. Rural communities are also affected, not just the urban areas. Farmers did not used to lock up their machinery in Cambridgeshire. When I was a young man staying at a farm where my uncle worked, you could just go out, get the key off a hook, put it in the tractor and off you went. I bet they do not do that now; I bet they are all well locked up. This is not a country at ease with itself while all this kind of thing is going on. I suspect that there is much general angst about the state of Great Britain among our people today.

It is linked to the fact that our economy is stagnating, public services are struggling—you can point to very few of them and say that they are doing well; they are all hard pressed—the international outlook is grim and the scars of Brexit persist, holding back the economy in particular. There is much to do; the challenges for the Government are many and complex.

It was good to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Hanson, the other day, outlining the Government’s plans in this area. In his contribution, he brought verve and energy to the debate on the problem of crime in our communities. He also recognised that it will take more than a crackdown to tackle anti-social behaviour. Youth services and clubs, community centres, libraries and education centres—all of which help with socialising young people —have been badly cut in many areas. I take this opportunity to congratulate all those who have helped rescue the iconic Salford Lads and Girls Club, which was announced this week. Unfortunately, not every youth club has the same range of patrons willing to give generous donations as was the case in Salford.

A distinguished former Labour Prime Minister famously said:

“Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”.


That should always be the maxim of a UK Government. While I welcome the Government’s proposals—a new law to protect retail workers, introducing respect orders, tackling low-value shoplifting and increasing the number of police—they need to be accompanied by a recognition that economic growth nationally, and new vitality in our town centres, are very important. Poverty and crime walk arm in arm—one feeds the other.

The Government handled the summer riots very well—they were tough—and I hope they do as well with the criminality in our communities. If the objectives of growth, growth and growth are met, we will have every chance to make a huge difference to the problem that we now face and to create a happier country.

18:01

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, I very much welcome this debate and congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hannett of Everton, whom I regard as a noble friend—not in the sense used in our House but in the sense used outside it. We worked together at Tesco for many years. In that time, Tesco grew rapidly. That helped me as an executive, but it also helped the noble Lord, who often topped the table in new trade union membership as a result. He and Sir Terry Leahy had a shared love of Everton’s premier football team. Few people know that the packaging for Tesco value lines were blue and white because of that love.

I will talk about two things this afternoon: first, and very positively, the need to deal much better with retail crime and my support for that; and secondly, but only briefly as it is a wider issue, my concern about the negative impact of the Budget on retail.

Retail crime was a major concern when I worked in the retail sector—now 10 years ago—and the work we did together in the British Retail Consortium and with the police made a huge social contribution. We invested a lot in security measures and our security suppliers built up export-earning businesses overseas. At that time a lot of the theft was by individuals stealing to feed their drug habit. I remember the sadness of arresting such people when I started my Tesco life in a store in Brixton, which was cited by the noble Baroness, Lady Hazarika. Then, it was bottles of Nescafé down women’s trousers and cuts of meat smuggled out with the help of a blind eye at the check-out, but now the position is much worse. Organised crime groups are increasingly involved in systemic, large-scale retail theft, amply justifying a major initiative to tackle this.

I welcome the £7 million in the Budget for funding both the national policing intelligence unit, Opal, to combat organised gangs that target retail, and the National Business Crime Centre on prevention and the tackling of crime. However, this is funding over three years. It does not feel enough, given not only the ever-growing risk and the way gangs in one area use the proceeds of crime to expand into other areas but their growing use of knives and violence. My noble friend Lord Kirkham described this extremely graphically.

The truth is that retail crime in the UK has risen sharply, as the noble Lord, Lord Monks, explained. The graph in the excellent Library note shows how seriously the number of offences has increased, and we know that even that is an underestimate. According to the BRC, retail crime cost businesses £1.8 billion in 2023, which was double the previous year’s figure. Thefts rose to 16.7 million, up from 8 million. That is 45,000 theft incidents every day. Equally concerning is the incidence of violence against retail workers. It has skyrocketed, rising by 50% to 1,300 incidents a day. The noble Lord, Lord Hannett, explained the compelling numbers in this area.

I could see this coming during the passage of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill in 2021 and although I worked well from the Back Benches with the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, and secured some changes to sentencing guidelines, I would have liked Labour support for an actual offence of the kind that we introduced at that time for health workers. It was a missed opportunity, so I am delighted by the Government’s promise to create a new offence for assaulting retail workers. Please can they advance this quickly and introduce the necessary Bill? I believe that they will also expand electronic tagging and the use of facial technology.

The House of Commons is crying out for meaty Bills that contribute to growth rather than devoting so much time to debates, so I look forward to hearing the Minister’s plans for legislation and enforcement, and the £200 threshold. Will he agree to look at deterrent tariffs for this new assault offence and for retail crime more generally? These need to be tough enough to attract police time and police priority. One of my sons works for the Met, although not in retail, so I know how these things work. Moreover, we need dedicated resources for the police to address retail crime and capture the gangs. We are crying out for much-improved police response times to show that the damaging criminal behaviour seen in retail is taken seriously. I will strongly support tough measures.

This brings me on to the negative. Noble Lords will know that retail is vital to the UK economy and our high streets. It employs 3 million hard-working people and 2.7 million in the supply chain, contributing over £100 billion annually to GDP. What is so disappointing is that the Budget has created unmanageable costs for a sector which employs millions of people and yet runs on very low margins. The new policies are estimated by the BRC to add costs of £7 billion a year by 2025, threatening jobs, insolvencies and more inflation. That is £2.2 million on national insurance, £2.7 million on the national living wage increase and—another slap in the face—a packaging levy of £2 billion. Of course, retailers’ rates bills are also expected to increase in April. This does not leave much for the security measures that the industry needs to tackle crime, which cost it £1.2 billion in 2023—up from £720 million the previous year.

This is a very important and timely debate. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hannett, for his eloquence, his passion and his work on “freedom from fear” and for bringing us all together today. I trust that it will lead to early action.

18:08

[Baroness Crawley (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Hannett for introducing this vital debate. There can surely be no doubt that the scale of shop theft in the United Kingdom represents a national crisis. We seem, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hazarika, has said, to be no longer a nation of shopkeeping but a nation of shop-thieving, as the most recent set of statistics makes all too clear. It was good to see that a distinct offence of assaults on retail workers was heralded by the Government in the King’s Speech a few months ago and updated this week. I hope that USDAW’s “freedom from fear” campaign can move forward on that basis, and I thank my noble friend Lord Hannett for the part he has played in that over many years.

In the town closest to where I live, there are increasingly signs in shops asking people to be respectful to staff. In some ways, this is a good thing, but shoppers should require no reminder to be civil. I know people who, however financially challenged they may be in life, would never dream of stealing so much as a chocolate bar from a store. I also know people who take hourly paid jobs in shops, largely out of family financial necessity and certainly not out of a craving for that kind of work. Both sets of people deserve to be protected from rising prices, the inevitable consequence of so much shop theft, and from abuse, violence and anti-social behaviour, whatever its genesis, be it drugs, drink, organised crime or, as the noble Lord, Lord Monks, said, economic poverty.

We cannot rejuvenate the high street and put a stop to physical dereliction with such an epidemic of tawdry crime hanging in the air, nor grow our local economies or create new opportunities for the new independents who want to get going locally. Shopping malls and high streets should collectively be a space for comfort and quality, not a venue waiting to be exploited by thugs, vandals and, increasingly, gangs stealing on demand. In every sense of the term, shops are a place where decent people try to make a living. The scale of intimidation, as we have heard from many noble Lords, that they face in too many parts of the country is socially unacceptable and economically damaging. The courts and the police must really start playing their part. As we know, shop theft is not a victimless crime. Somebody pays for it in the end—you and me—as the noble Lord, Lord Kirkham, said. Meanwhile, staff and small business owners should not be fearful about going to work and that they will be abused, threatened or worse, as we have heard.

USDAW has welcomed the announcement from the Government that they will introduce new respect orders as part of the crime and policing Bill. They give the police and councils powers to crack down on repeated anti-social behaviour, ensuring that repeat offenders face the consequences of their actions. These new powers, announced this week, come alongside a commitment to fund thousands more neighbourhood officers and PCSOs. New legislation will also remove the threshold of so-called low-value shoplifting offences—I am afraid those days are long gone. Paddy Lillis, USDAW’s general secretary, has said:

“After years of the Conservatives effectively decriminalising retail crime, leading to a more than doubling in shoplifting since the pandemic, we now have a Government that is delivering on its promise to bring town centre crime under control”.


The impact of retail crime on businesses, workers and communities has been horrific. Customer theft is the biggest source of financial loss for businesses. In 2022-23, businesses spent £1.2 billion on increasing their security systems. This represented an astounding 65% increase on the previous year. The Retail Trust’s 2024 survey of over 1,000 retail workers found that 47% of them really feared for their safety at work. That is a dreadful statistic, but the retailers have become fatalistic about whether reporting crime will produce any results.

This is where the Government’s recent announcements bring us some hope, finally. The Government recognise the scale of the issue and are determined to do something about it—the sooner the better. We cannot continue where we are. The old ways are just not working.

18:15

[Baroness Donaghy (Lab)]

I congratulate my noble friend Lord Hannett on initiating this debate and pay tribute to his years of campaigning for the rights of shop workers. I have worked with many women activists from USDAW over the years, particularly when I was a member of the women’s committee of the TUC. Of course, I worked with a predecessor of his, Lord Davies of Coity. When he was simply Garfield Davies, we were both members of the executive of the European TUC. More importantly, some would say, he roped me in to be a member of the TUC cricket team—a role he took extremely seriously while I stayed as close to the boundary as I could to avoid that leather ball.

I always admired USDAW’s work because my mother was a shop worker in the Scotch Wool Shop, in Woodward’s, the department store in Leamington, where I also worked for a while, and in Scholl’s Foot Care. None of those shops exist now. For years, the union has campaigned for more protection for its workers, and I welcome the Government’s announcement that there is to be the stand-alone offence that has already been referred to. I assume, by the way, that that also includes warehouses associated with retail. Perhaps the Minister could confirm that they will still be regarded as covered by that protection.

I had the privilege to move the Private Member’s Bill in this House that successfully provided for legislation on assaults against emergency workers. Of course, we all know that this does not solve all the problems. The level of violence some shop workers have had to face has already been described, and it is frightening. A few hundred yards from where I live in Peckham, a small bookmaker’s was invaded by a gunman not once, but twice. The second time, barely over £100 was taken and a gun was put to the head of the female assistant. Needless to say, that bookmakers never reopened. I wonder what Mr Chris Philp, with his bright idea of a citizen’s arrest, would have done in those circumstances.

I appreciate that the Government have made a number of announcements intended to tackle this issue. The additional money, which has already been referred to, to keep the National Business Crime Centre and the relevant national policing unit working will certainly help gather information over time and change the climate of crime left by the previous Government. If noble Lords opposite are a bit hurt by that remark, perhaps their Front Bench can explain why the Government left that increase of 30% in assaults and abuse of shop workers in one year, 2023.

Additional money to train the 13,000 extra neighbourhood police and PCSOs is also welcome. The noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, told us on Tuesday in questions on the Statement on respect orders and anti-social behaviour—a very useful trailer to this debate—that the Met website indicated a 15-minute wait for shopkeepers reporting incidents. This may explain why so many do not report incidents at all, and why thieves think they have a free pass. Will there be a concerted effort to tackle that response rate? Also, can the Minister say more about the neighbourhood policing guarantee, which intends to restore patrols in retail crime hotspots?

I have two other medium-term concerns. Can anything be done to clarify the current recorded crime data? The Office for National Statistics has stated that estimates from the Crime Survey for England and Wales should be designated as accredited official statistics, but apparently the police-recorded crime data has not been accredited, and we have been told that it should be used for illustration purposes only. Is that because the police have to record their data under so many different laws: the Theft Act, the Offences against the Person Act, the Criminal Justice Act, the Protection from Harassment Act and the Anti-social behaviour, Crime and Policing Act? Is there any way we can improve efficiency and effectiveness here?

My second medium-term concern is this: are the Government satisfied that Amazon is paying the same proportion of tax that shop owners have to pay to stay in business? It would be a pro-business move if the Government provided a level playing field for shop owners.

The USDAW survey indicates that 70% of staff experience verbal abuse, 41% of women experience sexism and 54% of non-white workers experience racial harassment. We are talking epidemic proportions here. Do we know whether supermarket owners are satisfied that their staffing levels provide a safer environment? Are they satisfied that the calibre and training of their security staff are sufficient for them to do a good job? I appreciate that small shops cannot necessarily make the same provisions.

Finally, I congratulate the Minister on his efforts to turn this lawless ship around. During the two hours of this debate, 109 shopworkers will have experienced incidents of violence and abuse. That is a shocking epitaph for the previous Government, but also a worrying statement about the kind of society we have become.

18:21

[Lord Godson (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hannett of Everton, for securing this important debate on retail crime, which, along with property crime more broadly, is a crimewave that, as has been described by noble Lords, is engulfing our streets and neighbourhoods. I also pay tribute to the authoritative remarks of my noble friends Lord Kirkham and Lady Neville-Rolfe, which I think prove amply the value of this House in bringing such important issues to the top of the national agenda.

We all know that the latest statistics show that police-recorded offences of shop theft—sorry, it is a bit difficult altering one’s vocabulary; it is a bit like the shift from QC to KC in respect of noble and learned Lords—have risen to a 20-year high. They are up 29% on last year, yet retail crime and the wider concept of property crime as a whole are too often not considered worthy of attention, regularly dismissed as they are as mere low-level crime. I will say more about that later.

I must declare an interest, in that Policy Exchange, the think tank for which I work, has long taken an interest in the impact of property crime, and retail crime in particular. In 2015, in the wake of the Tottenham riots, it published two reports by a then relatively obscure Back-Bencher, David Lammy, one of which was entitled Taking Its Toll: The Regressive Impact of Property Crime in Britain. He found that such crime is particularly insidious because it impacts, ultimately, upon the poorest in society. That shopworkers are being forced to endure all this in their working lives is intolerable, but the effects of this type of criminality upon the whole of society are broader and more subversive.

The British Retail Consortium estimates that £1.8 billion per year is lost to customer theft, costs which affect the poorest customers most when they are passed on through higher prices and rising insurance premiums, thus becoming unsustainable to retailers. Staff become too scared to go to work and choose to seek employment elsewhere. Without concerted action, we now risk scenes similar to those seen elsewhere in the world, most notoriously in San Francisco, where a permissive environment towards theft, violence and abuse has had a substantial knock-on effect, leading to widespread shop closures and the creation of economic wastelands across entire, mostly already poor, neighbourhoods, but not just the poor neighbourhoods.

It is a positive step that the Government are planning, through a crime and policing Bill, to reverse the catastrophic decision to downgrade the theft of goods worth less than £200 to a summary-only offence. I welcome also the decision to create a stand-alone offence of assaulting a shopworker and the associated intention to boost neighbourhood policing. However, I must ask: will all this be enough? It is unfortunately true that the forces of law and order have become increasingly absent when it comes to this form of offending. Of the estimated 16 million offences of shop theft committed last year, there were only 37,000 prosecutions—a rate of less than 0.25%. The Metropolitan Police commissioner is on record as describing shop theft as a “capacity challenge” for the police.

The THRIVE model is currently used by the police to prioritise their response to incidents. The acronym, as many noble Lords will know, stands for: threat, harm, risk, investigation, vulnerability and engagement. But the model, as currently constituted, fails to recognise sufficiently the broader impact of property crime. As a result, this type of criminality rarely meets the threshold for a robust police response. I fear that the Government will claim that police operational independence means that changes in this area are beyond their reach. If this is the case can the Minister now advise this House, and the public, exactly what policy the Government can and will implement to guarantee that police forces will deploy their resources to deal effectively with property crime? Prolific offenders must be subject to punishments which reflect the totality of their offending and their impact. If nothing else, the law-abiding public are surely entitled to a break from some of the worst of these offenders.

Earlier this year, we also saw the unedifying scenes where offenders were released early from their prison sentences; they ended up celebrating on the streets. Given that our prison capacity is already woefully insufficient, can the Minister advise what measure the Government will introduce to ensure that repeat offenders committing property and retail crime serve a suitable measure of justice, if not sentenced now to a term of imprisonment? I fear, however, that all of these good measures will count for little if the culture of the police and the courts does not change markedly in this regard.

I was much impressed by the testimony of the noble Baroness, Lady Hazarika, on her experiences in south London. If I may say to her, it was the most brilliant case that I have heard in either House of Parliament for that now unpopular doctrine from the United States of broken windows, pioneered by George Kelling and James Q. Wilson in their Atlantic article in the early 1980s and which, of course, had so marked an impact upon the thinking of Bill Bratton, one of the greatest police commissioners and officers of our time, in cleaning up New York during the 1990s and early 2000s. As noble Lords will know, the broken windows doctrine was about the sight of visible crime in terms of vandalism or shoplifting—low-level crime, as it is inaccurately described. If I can describe in a more popular way the import of what broken windows was all about, and what the noble Baroness was saying, it reminds me rather of the line in the musical “Oliver!”. When Fagin is speaking of Bill Sykes, he said:

“I recall, he started small


He had to pick-a-pocket or two”.


That is the essence of broken windows: what starts small ends up much bigger.

What struck me so much in the noble Baroness’s testimony, as it seems to apply to so much of the debate on law and order at the moment, is that she described how the security guard fears the thug much more than the thug fears the security guard. Perhaps we can get to a gameplan from the Minister. We should handle this in a non-partisan way. I know that one noble Baroness referred to Chris Philp. I am not going to endorse anything about have-a-go heroes—but what is the gameplan from the Minister and the Government to ensure that, even where police officers are not present, the totality of civil society feels able, with the support of the police, to take on this kind of threat at all levels of our society?

18:29

[Lord Dubs (Lab)]

My Lords, I join in congratulating my noble friend Lord Hannett of Everton on initiating this debate and on his work on this subject over many years. I also serve on the Justice and Home Affairs Committee and, as the noble Lord, Lord Tope, indicated, we completed a short inquiry into shop theft last month. It may have been a short inquiry, but I found the evidence we had deeply shocking, as confirmed by the contributions today. So I welcome the chance to say a little, although most of my key points have already been used up by other Members.

I start with the expressions “shoplifting” and “shop theft”. We had a witness, Professor Emmeline Taylor, who said that shoplifting had

“connotations of being trivial, petty and somehow victimless”.

Years ago, “shoplifting” seemed to be an expression for schoolboys picking up a bag of sweets on their way home—not acceptable and quite wrong, but so different from what we are faced with today. We have already heard the statistics: in the year to March 2024, 443,995 incidents of shop theft were reported to the police, up 30% on the previous year. But it is very clear that any of the statistics we have are, as somebody said to us, a drop in the ocean. A vast amount of money has been taken from retailers—and, therefore, from us—through customer theft, which has doubled in the last year.

The first key point is that incidents of shop theft are seriously underreported, and a lot of the problems stem from the perception that it is not as big a problem as it really is. There is a further perception that shop theft is not treated seriously by the police—that may be unfair to them, but that is the perception. That inadequate response attributed to the police risks undermining confidence in them and indeed in the wider criminal justice system. If a retailer phones for help and nothing happens, confidence in the whole system has been lost. One thing that really shocked our committee was how highly organised some of the shoplifting is: there are whole groups of criminals who send people out to steal particular items, which they can resell all too easily elsewhere. It is a highly organised operation.

Some of the key points that came out to me represent for the Minister and the Government an agenda for action—not just ending the use of the term “shoplifting”. Of course, we all welcome the Government’s commitment to creating a new offence of assaulting a shop worker. It is intolerable that people who serve us when we do our shopping should be in fear of attacks that happen all too frequently. It is intolerable that that should be a way of life for them. As my noble friend said, it is a sign of how we, as a country, are sinking below the level where we used to be.

One other issue that came through to us was that, if an offence is committed within one police area, it seems to attract less attention than if the offence extends across more than one police area. Yet these thieves start small—or they start in one area—and then they move. So there should not be this limiting definition. We welcome that the Government will repeal the section in the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014 that in practice decriminalises shop theft where the value of the goods is under £200. Again, that means that there is no reporting and that it is not treated seriously enough by the powers that be—all of which adds to this very serious situation.

It is clear that we need new regulations to make it harder to sell stolen goods anonymously on online marketplaces. When things are stolen, it is too easy for them to be marketed anonymously online, which is surely not acceptable. Of course, we need new technologies wherever we can have them. If we are going to use facial recognition, there have to be safeguards, but these do exist. Certainly, we need all possible new technologies to deal with this. We need the maximum co-operation between the retail sector, the police, local councils and local communities. Only if we have such co-operation can we tackle the problem with confidence.

The Minister has an interesting task because the agenda set by this House will give him quite a lot to think about. I hope he can convert it into action—that will make a difference, and it will make the lives of many of the retail workers in this country more tolerable than they are now. In fact, it will make us a more law-abiding country.

18:35

[Lord Razzall (LD)]

My Lords, there is clearly common ground on how important the issues are that the noble Lord, Lord Hannett of Everton, has raised, as demonstrated by a number of noble Lords’ speeches.

I think both the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, and my noble friend Lord Tope indicated the known figures, as reported to the relevant committee, which are that 443,995 incidents of shop theft—as I will call it—were reported in the year up to March 2024. That was up 30% on the previous year. Of course, as noble Lords have indicated, they are only incidents that were reported to the police. Other figures suggest that there may have been up to 17 million incidents not reported in the same period. Other noble Lords have indicated that there seems to have been a change in practice, with a lot of shop theft now by organised gangs rather than by individuals. Other noble Lords also said that there has been a significant increase in violence and abuse towards retail shop workers.

It is unusual to sum up on a debate in which everyone agrees. I do not think that anyone has said anything that I disagreed with, with the possible exception of one thing by the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe. I did not entirely disagree with her, but she stands out as maybe saying something different. Everybody else has been completely unanimous in what they have said, so it is an unusual role to sum up today.

I therefore thought that I would pin down the Minister on the record and ask him to confirm the extent to which the Government accept the recommendations of the committee on which my noble friend Lord Tope and the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, have sat. The chair, my noble friend Lord Foster, unfortunately could not be here this evening. I would like the Government to confirm, if at all possible, whether they agree with the following major recommendations of that committee.

The first is to change the word “shoplifting” to “shop theft” in all circumstances, not just occasionally or where appropriate. Secondly, I think the Government have confirmed that they will create the offence of assaulting a retail worker, but perhaps the Minister can confirm the timing of that when he responds. Thirdly, do the Government support the repeal of Section 176 of the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act, which limited prosecution for theft under £200? If so, what is the timing of that? Fourthly, what are the Government’s proposals to improve treatment for people where there is drug and alcohol involvement? A number of noble Lords have indicated that this is a key factor in increases in shop theft and violence, so perhaps the Minister can confirm what plans the Government have to improve and invest in that area. Fifthly, do the Government agree on the need to improve reporting systems between retailers and the police, which was a key recommendation of the committee? Sixthly, do the Government agree to legislate to regulate the ethical use of new technologies, especially by private companies, for crime prevention, which again was a recommendation of the committee?

There may have been other recommendations by the relevant committee, but those seem to have been the key ones and from these Benches we urge their implementation. I will just float two other possibilities that have not been raised by any noble Lord. First, will the Government find a way to end two toxic practices that affect many retail workers? The first is being forced, typically in the run-up to Christmas, to break the law in order to meet delivery quotas. The second is people on zero-hours contracts receiving less than one week’s notice of their working hours. Are the Government prepared to look at that?

Secondly, and this may not command universal support among your Lordships, what do the Government think of the idea of a higher minimum wage for workers on zero-hours contracts as compensation for their irregular working hours, particularly in the retail sector? I am delighted to have wound up on this report, and I am delighted that we seem to have unanimity.

18:41

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hannett of Everton, for bringing this important debate to the House and for the work he has done and is doing in this important area. Indeed, I thank all noble Lords for their thoughtful and very sincere contributions this evening. I think we can all agree that the impact of retail crime on workers, the community and local economies is a real threat to businesses and people’s livelihoods. As a Conservative, I believe in being tough on crime and I welcome any attempt by the Government to stamp out retail crime where they see it.

We have heard a lot today about the record of the previous Government. Since 2010 neighbourhood crimes, including burglary, robbery and theft from the person, are down by 48% and overall violent crime is down by 44%, with more police officers on the streets than in 2010. The previous Government took a number of significant steps to reduce and prevent retail crime. Our plan, Fighting Retail Crime: More Action was launched on 10 April and highlighted five areas of work to tackle retail crime. We made it easier for retailers to report crime by allowing them to send CCTV footage of an incident to allow it to be processed as quickly as possible after an offence is committed. However, there has been a worrying rise in shoplifting and violence towards retail workers, which we need to address.

Police-recorded crime figures show that shoplifting offences—I will use that term just for the moment—increased by 37% in the 12 months to December 2023, although the number of people charged with shoplifting offences in the same period rose by 46%, which demonstrates that the previous Government took shoplifting and retail crime extremely seriously.

I want to address the issue of shop theft under £200, which has been referred to in this debate as “decriminalisation”. We did not change the law on shop theft; it has always been a criminal offence. However, under the previous Government it was made a summary offence in 2014. To stress this point, we did not decriminalise shop theft under the value of £200. It remains a punishable offence under the Theft Act but a summary-only offence, triable at a magistrates’ court. I assure noble Lords, given my background in policing, that it is a Section 1 offence, it has always been considered as a Section 1 offence by me, and I think “shoplifting” is a rather unfortunate term. When I think back to my own policing experience, I spent some years as a CID officer at Marylebone police station, which covered Oxford Street, one of the busiest streets in London.

The noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, raised a very important point about processing these people. One of the big challenges when you have a police station full of people who are perhaps of no fixed abode or have come to London on a shopping spree is dealing with them administratively, which is very difficult and takes time. It is all well and good talking about resources for police, but the question is how we deal with these people, and perhaps we have to streamline how we do so.

If I may, I have some questions for the Government. In our plan, the Conservatives included a presumption towards electronic monitoring as part of a sentence served in the community for those who repeatedly steal from shops. Can the Minister confirm whether His Majesty’s Government will be doing the same, building on this good work? This legislative change will provide that, on the third sentencing occasion, an offender would be electronically monitored as part of any community sentence, or post-release for the duration of any licence period. Will the Minister confirm whether the legislation will be changed as we intended?

Finally, in government, the Conservatives introduced the crime of assault specifically against retail workers. The previous Government pledged the use of facial recognition technology to help catch perpetrators and prevent shoplifting in the first place, backed by a £55.5 million investment. Can the Minister assure the House that this investment will continue to be provided at the same level, as a minimum, by the current Government?

We must take a moment to think of lone retail workers, often working late at night to serve their communities, who may be victims of opportunistic crime. It is imperative that we support those who work in this sector and seek the harshest possible penalties for those who seek to disrupt our social fabric by attacking retail workers. I feel sure that the Minister, together with the House, will agree with me on this point.

As a former police officer of 32 years, I know how important it is that the police are well-funded, supported and seen as integral to the community. I also know how important it is to tackle retail crime, and the deep harm it causes to local communities. I point to our good record in this area but note that there is always more to be done. I look forward to receiving answers from the Minister and to listening to what he has to say. I thank noble Lords for their attention.

18:47

[The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Hanson of Flint) (Lab)]

I am grateful to all noble Lords who have contributed to this debate. As the noble Lord, Lord Razzall, said, there is unanimity on the approach to the issue of shop theft, as has been eloquently outlined by my noble friend Lord Hannett. I thank him for securing this timely debate, and all who have spoken in it. My noble friend brings to his role in your Lordships’ House a wealth of experience in standing up for shop workers in his work for USDAW. He is continuing that work in conjunction with his colleague Paddy Lillis, who is the general secretary of USDAW. Most importantly, my noble friend brings the life experience of thousands of members in shops and stores across the United Kingdom, who have contributed to developing USDAW’s policy and, in doing so, the policy of the Labour Party and this Labour Government. They contributed too to the pressure that was put on the previous Conservative Government to take action.

I declare an interest: I have been a member of the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers for 44 years. I have stacked shelves, worked the tills and delivered to people’s doors, so I know the pressures in retail. The noble Baroness may be interested to know that I did this for Tesco, and later the Co-op.

The important thing is that there is unanimity here today. We need to change the tenor of the debate on shop theft and the protection of shop workers. We have seen today that there is unanimity in this debate: it is not acceptable in our society to steal from shops; it is not acceptable to attack shop workers in the course of their duty; and it is not acceptable to undertake ram raids or organise crime raids on shops and outlets. This is not a victimless crime; it adds money to everybody’s bills and to the cost of strengthening security for staff, and this Government are committed to taking action on it.

We do so for the reasons that have been mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Hannett, the noble Lord, Lord Kirkham, in a very powerful speech, and my noble friends Lord Monks and Lady Crawley and many others, who indicated that there is an unacceptable rise in the level of shop theft.

I particularly welcome the committee report that was produced. The noble Lord, Lord Tope, was a key member of the committee, along with my noble friend Lord Dubs—who, I must say, on his 92nd birthday is arguing in this Chamber for protection for shop staff and against shop theft. That shows the commitment that he has to his party and his cause but also to the good of the country at large. I wish him a very happy birthday.

Shop theft is up 29% in the year to June 2024 compared with the previous year. The British Retail Consortium crime survey has shown that around 475,000 incidents of violence occur each year. My noble friends Lord Monks, Lady Crawley and Lady Hazarika all mentioned the importance of tackling that crime. Whether it is on Lambeth High Street, in Brixton or in north Wales, where I am heading back this evening, there will be a concerted effort to ensure that we reduce the number of crimes that occur in shops. However, it is not just about the shoplifting; it is unacceptable to have 1,300 incidents of violence against staff in our communities at large.

It is not easy for this Government, and it will never be easy. But the points that the noble Lord, Lord Godson, and other Members of this House made today are extremely important. That is why the Government have a plan for action to both mirror some of the recommendations made by the Home Affairs Committee and Justice Committee of this House, and to commit to a range of things.

On a personal basis, having campaigned for some of these things for the best part of 20 years, I am absolutely delighted to stand at this Dispatch Box and to be able to put action in place, because we have a Government who have committed to do that. Among the actions that we will bring forward and put in place is a specific offence of attacking shop workers, which USDAW—which I am a proud member of—has campaigned for since 2003. Freedom from fear is an absolutely important issue. Shop staff are not just serving us but are upholding the law on alcohol, knife, solvent and tobacco sales. When they find themselves facing threats because of that, they deserve our support and our encouragement. That is why the Government will in due course, as a manifesto commitment, bring forward a specific offence of assaulting shop workers.

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Davies, that the £200 threshold did not change the law but it sent a signal to the police that shoplifting under £200 was not an important issue. I recognised that in 2014 and I led the opposition to that. We forced a vote on that clause then because we thought it would downgrade the importance of shop theft, which, as a whole, it did. We will repeal that in due course and will make sure that the police have proper guidance on those issues.

We will, as a number of my noble friends mentioned, increase the number of neighbourhood police and PCSOs to 13,000, to have a named officer in each community who will work with the local community and look at the very issues that the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, mentioned as well—community intelligence-gathering and community support. Through work we are doing now, which is a continuation of the previous Government’s work, we will look at Opal and Project Pegasus to co-ordinate action on gangs, tackling crime across borders and across police authorities.

There were points made in the debate which I will certainly reflect on, as well as the issue of drug and alcohol treatment orders and on technology, ensuring that we look at facial technology issues as a whole. We will reflect on those issues in due course, and when legislation on these issues comes before this House, which it will in relatively short order, we will be able to deal with those issues as a whole. We keep new technologies under review, and we will keep those technologies under review in the future.

I noticed a small frisson of concern from the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, about the Labour Government’s Budget, which I will return to briefly in a moment. As my noble friend Lord Hannett said, it provided £100,000 for the National Police Chiefs’ Council, £5 million over the next three years to develop Operation Opal and £2 million over the next three years to build the National Business Crime Centre. If the noble Baroness looks at the detail in the Budget, she will see that there are proposals on business rates and on strengthening and revitalising the high street. I have campaigned for these issues over the last 10 to 20 years and I am more than proud to stand here today and say that this Government will take action on shop theft and assaults on retail workers in due course.

The facial recognition technology mentioned by the noble Lords, Lord Kirkham and Lord Davies, is a very powerful tool and has huge potential to keep our streets safe. This gives us an opportunity to look at how we operate it. We particularly want to look at how we can put that on a firm footing to make our streets safe. In answer to their specific point, we want to ensure that we look at the legal framework and discuss that issue with the public over the coming months.

I am acutely aware that this House has been united today. There are no political differences. There may be differences over pressure, time and the things we have done, but there is unanimity that Parliament and Government should take action on these issues. A number of detailed issues were mentioned. I could go through them, but that would take time. I hope that the emphasis I have put on the measures the Government intend to bring forward give reassurance to all Members of this House that this Government are committed to the issue of shop theft.

The noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, summed up the importance of this issue and how we need to focus on the staff. Shop workers will be on the train with me tonight. They will be on the bus going home. They will be walking the streets around you. They are the people who serve you and they deserve our support. The customers are there to support the staff and we need to make a stand to say that, although we will never eradicate shop theft or violence, it is a priority for the Government, the police and Parliament that, between us, we will help reduce crime, shoplifting and violence over the course of this Parliament.

I commend the measures that my noble friend Lord Hannett has proposed. We will hopefully find widespread support in due course for the measures that this Parliament will face when the Government bring them forward.

[Lord Hacking (Lab)]

Does my noble friend agree that the most shocking account in this debate was given by our noble friend Lady Hazarika who was in a shop when a rogue came in and stole two bottles of alcohol? He was known as a repeat offender and his identity was known. Would my noble friend agree that that is a most shocking account for this framework to improve the law?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I am grateful to my noble friend for his intervention after I thought I had finished. Repeat offenders are part of a vicious cycle that needs to be broken. Part of that is due to alcohol or drug dependence and part of it is due to interventions in alcohol and drug dependence. That is part of the focus of the Ministry of Justice. The MoJ will look at many measures in relation to how we better tag, control and monitor offenders and what interventions we make to reduce their dependence on alcohol and drugs.

It is important that the revolving door of prison sentences—the cycle of people going into prison for six months, coming out, committing the offences that my noble friend Lady Hazarika mentioned, going back to prison, coming out again and then finding themselves homeless—needs to be broken. I know that my noble friend Lord Timpson, who is accountable to this House, is very exercised by those issues and will bring forward a number of measures to try to improve how we deal with offenders who have a persistent offending behaviour. Overall, the issues of tolerance are still there. We should not tolerate shoplifting, attacks on shop staff or organised crime gangs, and we should look collectively at what measures we can bring. I hope that I have given some indication to the House of how we can do that.

19:00

[Lord Hannett of Everton (Lab)]

My Lords, brevity is probably the call at this time of night. I thank all noble Lords for their contributions; all of them made excellent points—too many to repeat. Again, I thank the Minister for his consistent support on this issue, not just here in this House but, prior, in the other House.

My noble friend Lady Hazarika gave an example of her real-life experience. I wish that it was a one-off. It was a graphic example of what takes place on a regular basis.

I never wanted this to become a political debate, and nor was it—it would be hard to have any separation of support on resolving and challenging this important issue for shop workers. The noble Lord, Lord Razzall, made a point about unanimity. It was interesting to hear that every speaker, irrespective of which party they belong to or have been a member of, knows that this is a joint issue that needs a joint approach.

I thank everybody for their support. I hope that, if there is one thing noble Lords take from this debate, it is that the contributions made here today will be so important to retail workers in my union when they realise that, clearly, there are people in this place who care as they do and have articulated it.

On the £200 issue, I will finish by saying that I do not believe for one minute that it was intentional for the police not to respond, but the reality is that they were not responding. The real risk here is of retail crime being normalised. It was becoming not acceptable but normalised. It was no longer a shock to hear some of these stats.

The noble Lord, Lord Monks, said something that connected with me when he made reference to poverty and retail crime—not in terms of a justification or an explanation but in saying that, in reality, when there are major economic challenges, you have different extremes. There are the gangs, which are there to make money and do not care about the impact, and then there are other people who are more desperate. I do not say that as a justification; I just say that these are the realities.

Once again, I thank noble Lords for their contributions. USDAW fully appreciates this, and it has been well received.

Motion agreed.

House adjourned at 7.02 pm.