Retail Crime: Effects

Baroness Neville-Rolfe Excerpts

Thursday 5th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[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.