Violence and Abuse towards the Retail Workforce

Feryal Clark Excerpts

Tuesday 5th December 2023 Westminster Hall

[Feryal Clark (Enfield North) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. It is also a pleasure to stand across the Chamber from the Minister for the first time. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Blaydon (Liz Twist) on securing this important debate, and I thank all the Members who have participated and put on record why it is so important.

I spent a great many years—about 10 years from the age of 14—working in retail. Granted, that was a long time ago, but I do not remember things being so bad for retail workers. The impact of the abuse of shop workers is far-reaching, whether that is the physical and emotional toll on those who suffer the abuse, the impact of theft on employers and retailers or the knock-on impact of those issues on our high streets, which lose out massively when local residents say they do not feel safe in their communities.

I pay tribute to the contributions made by my hon. Friends the Members for Manchester, Withington (Jeff Smith) and for Stockport (Navendu Mishra) and the hon. Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Steven Bonnar)—I hope I have that right. Retail crime is a blight on our high streets and local communities. Anecdotally, it is felt by our constituents on a daily basis, but that is also borne out in the statistics, which reveal horrible and worrying trends. Retail crime, violence, threats and abuse towards shop workers have increased substantially in recent years, and my hon. Friend the Member for Blaydon set out the harrowing levels of violence and assaults.

Research by the Co-op shows that there have been 300,000 incidents involving shoplifting, abuse and violence in its stores in the past year alone. Figures from the British Retail Consortium, the retail trade body, show that retail crime in England and Wales was up 26% in 2022, which equates to a staggering 850 incidents every day. That is goods being lifted and staff being abused physically or threatened with weapons. Of course, there is a cost to retailers and consumers too. The BRC estimated that, in 2021, even before the current peak in shoplifting incidents, stolen goods had cost retailers £1 billion.

If we talk to anyone in retail, they will say that it is not just petty thieves behind this, but serious and organised crime. Criminals operating in gangs are stealing large quantities of goods and selling them, and retail workers are operating on the frontline of this shoplifting epidemic. The Co-op sees an estimated 1,000 cases of shoplifting in its stores a day, and every day four or five staff members are physically attacked. As we have heard, they describe attacks involving syringes and knives; it is truly appalling. No worker should ever have to go into work in such fear or under such a threat of attack.

I pay tribute to the shop workers’ union, USDAW, for running a robust campaign on the issue to better protect its members, and to the retailers investing in anti-theft measures and better security for their stores. Shockingly, it has fallen to them to act, because retail crime and the abuse of shop workers has exploded under this Government. After 13 years of Tory Government, over 90% of crimes are going unsolved, meaning that criminals are less than half as likely to be caught than they were under the last Labour Government. More criminals are being let off and far more victims are being let down.

The Tories’ shoplifting charter means that offences involving goods under £200 are rarely investigated properly and criminals are rarely brought to justice. We have also had the decimation of neighbourhood policing, with town centre policing controls cut. Even when offenders are detained by security—as we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Blaydon—the Co-op says that they are let go in 80% of cases in its stores because the police are stretched so thinly that they cannot attend the scene. It is therefore no surprise that, despite the amazing work of our police officers in testing circumstances, public confidence in the police has been on a downward trend since 2017, falling from 62% to just 55% in 2020.

It is the first duty of any Government to keep their citizens safe, and the Government are failing badly—that is the abysmal Conservative record on law and order. The Opposition are determined to end this chaos. Labour will not stand for any more failure to combat crime. To deliver on that, we have set out our community policing guarantee.

First, we will put police back on the beat. We will bring in proper neighbourhood policing, with 13,000 new police officers and PCSOs on our streets. That will mean more local officers embedded in and servicing local communities, with a named officer assigned to every high street. Secondly, we will have zero tolerance of antisocial behaviour, with repeat offenders banned from town centres. Thirdly, we will build pride in neighbourhood policing by giving local people and businesses a say in how their local area is policed and ensuring that there is proper career progression in the police for neighbourhood police officers. Fourthly, we will end the £200 shoplifters’ charter, reverse the Tories’ decision to downgrade such crimes, and properly crack down on all shoplifting once and for all. Finally, we will create a new specific offence of assault against shop workers. Everyone has the right to feel safe at work, and Labour will deliver on that promise.

I pay tribute to USDAW and to colleagues in the Co-operative party, who have fought hard, and continue to push, for this change. After years of this Government’s failure to tackle crime, Labour is determined to turn the tide on rising shop theft and antisocial behaviour, and to make the streets safer.

[The Minister for Crime, Policing and Fire (Chris Philp)]

It is a pleasure, as always, to serve under your august chairmanship, Sir Edward, and to follow—for the first time, I think—the hon. Member for Enfield North (Feryal Clark), whom I welcome to her place in the shadow Front-Bench team.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Blaydon (Liz Twist) for securing this important debate, which follows one on the Floor of the House. The Opposition day debate this afternoon was on a broadly similar topic, but it is good to have a further opportunity to discuss the matter in a little more detail and in slightly less heated circumstances.

Before I respond to hon. Members’ very good points, I want to say that I agree with the assessment that retail outlets are the lifeblood of our community. They are often centres not only for shopping, but for meeting others. They are far more vibrant than just buying something online and having it delivered to one’s doorstep in a cardboard box.

I also agree that it is unacceptable that retail workers are suffering from assaults and threats. I have particular sympathy with them because my very first job in south London was stacking shelves, among other things, in a Sainsbury’s not far from my current constituency, although I must confess that unlike Labour Members, I never joined a trade union.

[Feryal Clark]

You should give it a go.

[Chris Philp]

I thank Members for their kind entreaties, but I will probably give it a miss.

This is a serious issue and the Government are taking it very seriously. Of course, crime in general is coming down. The crime survey for England and Wales, which according to the Office for National Statistics is the only reliable measure of long-term crime trends, shows that overall crime is down 10% year on year, and like-for-like crime is down 56% since 2010. That is very welcome, but—in common with other countries in the western world, including the United States, France and Germany—we have seen a worrying increase in shoplifting and assaults against retail workers in the past year or two. As I say, the phenomenon is not confined to the UK; it is wider than that.

Although it is welcome that prosecutions for shoplifting have increased by 29% since last year, the Government said in response to a number of retailers, including the Co-op and others, that more needs to be done. That is why I sat down over the summer with the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for serious organised and acquisitive crime—Amanda Blakeman, the chief constable of north Wales—to talk about developing a police action plan to do a lot more.

That action plan was published with the agreement of the police four or five weeks ago and was launched at No. 10 Downing Street. It contains a number of important components. The first is a commitment that the police will always follow up all reasonable lines of inquiry in relation to all crime. That is relevant to all kinds of crime types, but shoplifting is one of the most important. That means that if there is evidence that can be followed up, such as CCTV footage, the police will always do that regardless of the value of the goods stolen.

In the past six to 12 months, the artificial intelligence algorithm that enables facial matching has become a lot more sophisticated. If an image is received from a crime scene—it could be from a Ring doorbell, a dashcam, a mobile phone or CCTV anywhere, including in a shop—as it should always be under this new commitment, it can be run through the police national database, which contains millions of facial images from custody records. The algorithm is so good at matching now that even blurred or partially obscured images can be matched. The commitment always to follow lines of inquiry and always run images through the facial recognition database will lead to a lot more offenders being caught—shoplifters, but others as well. I set the target for police forces across England and Wales to double their use of facial recognition searches this year.

The first element is always to follow all reasonable lines of inquiry, with a particular emphasis on CCTV and facial recognition. Secondly, there is a police commitment to prioritise attending incidents of shoplifting in person where that is necessary to secure evidence; where there has been an assault on a retail worker, which is obviously relevant to today’s debate; and where an offender has been detained by, for example, store security staff. I heard statistics from the Co-op suggesting that where store security staff had detained an offender, the police had attended only in a quarter of cases. That is frankly unacceptable. We now have a commitment from policing to prioritise attendance in all cases where an offender has been detained. I would like Members of Parliament of all parties and police and crime commissioners to hold the police to account for delivering that.

Thirdly, the plan contains a commitment to use data analytics to identify and go after prolific offenders—that is, identifying what is often quite a small number of people committing a large volume of offences and specifically going after them. Fourthly—it may have been the hon. Member for Blaydon who mentioned this—there is an element of serious and organised crime, with organised criminal gangs targeting retail outlets. Project Pegasus, led by the Sussex police and crime commissioner Katy Bourne in partnership with 16 retailers, gathers data from those retailers and passes it to OPAL, which is the police data analysis centre for serious organised crime, including acquisitive crime, to identify the criminal gangs and go after them. That is partly funded by those retailers but is supported and organised by the police.

Those are the four components: following all lines of inquiry, including CCTV and facial recognition; targeting prolific offenders; attending incidents a lot more frequently; and going after serious and organised crime. That package together will lead to a significant increase in the number of offenders who are caught and the number of assaults prevented, and we will see that 29% increase in prosecutions go up considerably more.