Retail Crime: Effects

Lord Dubs Excerpts

Thursday 5th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[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.