High Street Shops: Illicit Activity

Jim Shannon Excerpts

Wednesday 17th June 2026 Westminster Hall

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

It is a real pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Dowd. I say a big thank you to the hon. Member for Halesowen (Alex Ballinger) for bringing this important issue to the Floor of the House and for all of us who are here being able to speak on it as a result.

I rise to highlight a pressing crisis directly impacting local businesses and community safety across my Strangford constituency. At the epicentre of the constituency sits Newtownards, where we have Conway Square, a booming hub of local commerce. Yet Newtownards, my biggest town, currently faces the difficulty faced throughout this United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland: illicit activity impacting the fabric of the retail sector. Our high streets are the economic and social lifeblood of these distinct communities. Whether we are talking about the local traders in Newtownards, the independent businesses in Comber or the traditional shopkeepers at the Thursday market in Ballynahinch, they are forced to act as an unassisted frontline defence against an escalating wave of retail theft, criminal damage and antisocial behaviour.

[Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that we need to see a clampdown? We welcome the Government moving on this issue, but if there is a systematic clampdown, we have to try to ensure that the Government also recognise that we must not have even more derelict, empty properties on the high street. We need a combination of a crackdown on illegal shops, but also efforts to redevelop the high street for legal shops so that shoppers can enjoy them.

[Jim Shannon]

My hon. Friend always brings wise words and wisdom to the debate.

We frequently hear the narrative that Northern Ireland maintains historic lows in overall crime, but sweeping generalities do not always give the true picture. I know that the Police Service of Northern Ireland is not the Minister’s responsibility, but to give a perspective from Northern Ireland, which I always do in these debates—it is really important that we put it on the record—the PSNI has said that the overall crime statistics are down by some 2.3%, but in relation to my constituency of Strangford and to Newtownards in particular, Ards and North Down has bucked the positive trend. It stands out as one of the few policing districts to experience an increase in recorded crime. Unfortunately that is happening, and I am here to reflect that in this debate.

Long-term trend data reveals that, across the region, theft offences have risen substantially, driven heavily by a massive surge in shoplifting. It has reached the point at which shoplifting has hit some of the highest levels ever recorded in Northern Ireland’s recent history. In town centres such as Newtownards, the commercial crime wave is felt acutely. CrimeRate shows that the overall crime rate in Newtownards sits at 44 crimes per 1,000 people, which is 24% higher than the Northern Ireland average. That, again, gives an indication of the issues.

Crucially for our high streets, theft and shoplifting make up more than 20% of all recorded crime in Newtownards. That goes along with high-density antisocial behaviour and criminal damage, which intimidate shoppers and drive down footfall. As National Trading Standards warns, organised crime groups are actively infiltrating high street retail spaces. On our own doorsteps, shopkeepers face organised, brazen shoplifting rings that steal to order, often funding low-level drug networks or residual paramilitary elements that still attempt to exert control over our towns. I have been in touch with PSNI Superintendent Johnston McDowell to ensure that the police have a proactive partnership with the shopkeepers, the chamber of trade and individuals to reduce that. To expect a small business owner already battling inflation and footfall migration to absorb the financial losses of relentless retail theft is completely unsustainable.

The Minister is always responsive, and I know that she travels to Northern Ireland regularly. I also know that she likes going there—I am very biased, but doesn’t everybody? I believe we must work with the Northern Ireland Executive to allocate dedicated and visible town centre foot patrols that cover the full span of the constituency with a heavy permanent presence in Newtownards and stretching down as far as Ballynahinch so as to deter organised theft rings.

[Luke Myer (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to intervene on the hon. Gentleman for a change. I have been raising similar issues with Middlesbrough council about Middlesbrough town centre. I am assured that the council is bringing forward a plan soon. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that there needs to be closer collaboration between local government and central Government to address these issues?

[Jim Shannon]

The hon. Gentleman is right to add that issue to the debate. I know that when the Minister responds he will encourage us all in that regard.

I am not going to take all the time that has been awarded to me in this debate, but I will say that we must be more aggressive with the legal outcomes for repeat offenders. Shoplifting cannot be dismissed as a victimless, low-level offence; it is not that for those who are trying to make their living.

What discussions has the Minister had with the Justice Minister back home to ensure that we can do better? We need cross-district town centre shared networks with enhanced capital funding to expand localised business crime partnerships—that is the police, chamber of trade and local shopkeepers. We also need to share live digital intelligence and instantly flag active shoplifting groups. After Newtownards earlier this week, will those groups be in Bangor, Comber, Ballynahinch or Saintfield the following week? Our constituents and retailers across Strangford and this great United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland deserve town centres that feel welcoming, prosperous and secure. Let us deliver the legislative teeth that we need to ensure our shopkeepers and businesses are able to trade.

--- Later in debate ---

[Katie Lam (Weald of Kent) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Dowd. I congratulate the hon. Member for Halesowen (Alex Ballinger) on securing this important debate.

For far too many people and in far too many places, the high street has become a visible sign of where the British state has lost control. People suspect that the cash-only takeaways, barber’s shops and vape shops that they see springing up on their high streets are symptomatic of a deeper rot. As the hon. Gentleman and many others set out, in many cases they are right. All too often, such high street shops are linked to organised crime, including through the sale of illicit or counterfeit goods, money laundering, immigration crime and people smuggling.

Last month, the BBC uncovered that people smugglers are directing migrants to pay for illegal channel crossings using a network of high street businesses, including mobile phone shops. In 2024 alone, trading standards seized more than 1 million illegal vapes and 19 million illegal cigarettes. As the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Harpreet Uppal) mentioned, the National Crime Agency estimates that £1 billion of crime-linked cash is laundered through high street businesses every year. It is clearly difficult to produce reliable estimates of things such as money laundering, so the real figure may be even higher. The money laundered by such businesses often fuels human trafficking or the drug trade.

The problem is only getting worse. According to one survey, 99% of trading standards professionals have seen an increase in the number of cash-intensive businesses opening on their local high streets in recent years. Cash-intensive businesses often provide the best fronts for money laundering and the trade in illicit and counterfeit goods.

While businesses that do the right thing are struggling with ever more regulation and ever higher taxes, businesses with links to organised crime are thriving. To combat the rise in illicit activity on our high streets, we must understand the criminal networks that sustain that activity and the link in many cases between those networks and immigration.

Let us imagine, for example, an organised crime gang involved in the drugs trade. When that gang sells drugs to people, payment will most often be made in cash, because cash is harder to trace. However, if that business wants to bring its cash into the normal financial system, it will need to launder the money so as not to provoke suspicion. If a person suddenly deposits tens of thousands of pounds with no clear income source, a bank will register that as suspicious, but not so if the money is deposited by a high street business.

The gang might therefore set up a high street shop—something cash-intensive and with low overhead costs, such as a vape shop. The shop records its transactions but adds to those real purchases a series of phantom cash sales used to disguise the illicit cash raised by the sale of drugs. The deposit appears legitimate and can be backed up with paperwork. Once that cash is deposited, it can be paid out as profit to those involved in running the organisation, for example as a fake invoice to an overseas supplier that is paid out to a shell company registered abroad.

The criminal gangs involved in the drug trade operate across borders both financially and physically. They will have overseas suppliers who provide them with the drugs that they sell. These supply networks are often sustained by links between people of the same nationality, ethnicity or even extended family. Often, these drug gangs are also involved in other kinds of cross-border smuggling—of counterfeit goods, illegal tobacco and, indeed, people.

[Jim Shannon]

I thank the hon. Lady for bringing this to the attention of the Chamber today. One of the issues, which I know the Minister is well across, is the cross-border trade between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. We are the only part of the United Kingdom that has a land border. A better working relationship with the Garda Síochána is critical. Can the Minister confirm that the Garda Síochána, the Police Service of Northern Ireland and the police forces here on the mainland can work together to better defeat paramilitary and organised crime groups?

[Katie Lam]

The hon. Member is right that the common travel area presents particular challenges. It is crucial to maintain the sorts of relationships he is talking about in a way that keeps the public safe in Northern Ireland and the whole country.

If high street shops are already laundering money on behalf of these gangs, they might also sell the things that the gang illegally imports. They might serve as points of contact for people who are looking to smuggle people into Britain illegally, as was highlighted by the BBC’s most recent investigation.

Those shops might also help criminal gangs to bring people into this country by sponsoring their visas. As my hon. Friend the Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston (Neil O’Brien) has previously highlighted, many cash-intensive high street businesses sponsor an absurd number of visas. On paper, these people work for a legitimate high street business, but in practice many of them will be using that apparently legitimate employment as cover for their work as part of a criminal gang. Others may be working, or forced to work, for dramatically less than the minimum wage, which both exploits them and distorts the labour market. That happens everywhere in the country. In the stunning town of Tenterden in my constituency, Indian restaurant Badsha was recently found to have been employing illegal migrants for a fourth time, racking up £120,000 in fines and not paying a single penny.

I would appreciate it if the Minister set out how the Home Office thinks about and plans to tackle the links between illicit activity on the high street, organised crime, immigration and people smuggling, and how the Department’s plans for tackling illicit activity on the high street take account of those links. Does it keep a record of how many businesses raided under high street organised crime operations were also registered visa sponsors? Does it keep a record of the visa status and visa type of those employed by these businesses?

What proportion of high street businesses employing people illegally are repeat offenders like the one in my constituency? Will the Minister share what proportion of Operation Machinize targets in cases related to counterfeit goods, illegal tobacco or vapes, money laundering or the sale of drugs were also involved in illegal working, visa fraud or organised immigration crime and people smuggling?

[The Minister for Policing and Crime (Sarah Jones)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship this morning, Mr Dowd.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Halesowen (Alex Ballinger) for securing this excellent debate. The message I take away from it is, “You’ve done some stuff that we think is good, but we need to do a lot more.” This issue is undoubtedly one that we will all be judged on when we next stand before the electorate.

As I have in Croydon, every Member in this place will have experience of a high street that they grew up going to that they know will never again be as they remember it. We also know that we need to tell a new story for our high streets. As shops have closed for all the reasons that Members have outlined, illicit activity has stepped in. It is important to start with the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Jen Craft): we have not only to tackle the criminality, but to establish what we want to do with our town centres. As has been mentioned, there is some innovation across the country where town centres are growing, which is great.

The Government are very aware that we have to understand and appreciate the fact that the town centre of the future will be different, and we need to change laws and do what we can to encourage a new high street. A wider high street strategy is being pulled together at the moment; every Government Department that could possibly be relevant is coming together and asking, “What more can we do to ensure that our high streets can thrive for the businesses we want to see on them, rather than this illicit activity?”

The activity itself has been very well described, and my hon. Friends the Members for Leigh and Atherton (Jo Platt) and for Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes (Melanie Onn) showed leadership in painting us a very good picture of the problems we see nationally. We know there is this increase in shops—I see it on my high street, as everybody does—but people are not in them, so how are they making money? What is going on in that space?

As other Members will have done, I recently joined the raid of a shop in London, which was a big joint operation between trading standards, local authorities and the police, and some of the things I learned were very uncomfortable to hear. For example, an increasing number of builders are being employed by these shop owners to build hidden cupboards so that people can hide their illegal activities. Also, there were lots of cameras in the back of the shop, but they were not there to protect the shop itself; they were to keep an eye on the people working there—these are nasty criminal gangs that want to ensure that the people they employ are not stealing from them. The young lad who was in the shop when we did the raid had nothing to do with the ownership; apparently, the owner was away. As has been mentioned, understanding who owns some of these properties is a complicated and difficult challenge. I am very well aware of the problem that we are trying to fix.

I am very grateful to the many Members who pointed to the important work that the Government have introduced—I do not want to diminish it by saying that we of course need to go further. We have the new high street organised crime unit in the Home Office, as well as the £30 million that has been allocated, in part, to fund the National Crime Agency, and £6 million of which is going to trading standards. Many Members have talked about how the ability of trading standards to respond to today’s challenges has been completely wiped out, so that money will help them. Some £1.5 million has been allocated to immigration enforcement, just to add to all the other work that is happening in immigration—my hon. Friend the Member for Halesowen asked about the connections, which of course exist; just today, there was an immigration raid in my constituency—and £1.5 million is going from that pot to HMRC so that it can do some work on this issue. Members talked about Companies House; there is more work to be done there, for sure.

The closure powers—the closure notice extension to 72 hours and, looking ahead, the longer, 12-month closure—are important, and I am glad that Members have welcomed them. I was very interested in what Members had to say about the Netherlands. As Policing Minister, I do not really get to go on trips, but maybe there should be a Netherlands trip with the campaign group to see what is being done there. In the absence of such a trip, I will certainly read more about how that regime is working. That is a really important point: we should look to other countries and understand what they are doing.

We are open to all of the many good suggestions that Members have made. There is a ministerial group chaired by the new Security Minister; she would have been here, but she could not be, as she is introducing legislation today. I am also on the committee, along with all the Departments that Members would expect to be there. There was a push for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to do work in this space; I know that it is looking at that, and I will certainly talk to it more about that. I will say that all the suggestions that have been made today were mentioned in that first ministerial meeting; we talked about all the same issues. I know we need to go further and faster and we need to push forward, but there was nothing surprising in the suggestions that hon. Members made; these are very sensible things that we are looking at and want to take forward.

There will be big national pushes under Operation Machinize. For obvious reasons, I cannot say when they will be, but Operation Machinize has worked effectively; when all the agencies work together, there is a much more effective outcome. All Members made useful suggestions: more support for trading standards; looking at licensing and more powers for local authorities; data sharing—that is an important suggestion, which I certainly agree with—a place for direct reporting into trading standards, which is an interesting one; and more powers to tackle landlords as well as the organised crime.

The Home Office’s policing reform programme will, I hope, help us tackle these kinds of issues much more effectively. Setting up a national police service could tackle this co-ordinated, serious organised crime in a much better way. At the moment, every time there is a new issue, we have to set up a structure to tackle it at national level. The national police service will be there to do that. It will bring together the National Crime Agency, counter-terrorism and all the other national organisations. We know that some of this money laundering is driving terrorism, for example, and at the moment two different bodies are tackling that. Bringing it all together and having co-ordination at the centre will help.

At the bedrock of our policing policy, we have the commitment to 13,000 more neighbourhood officers on our streets. That will make a significant difference in how people feel about their high streets and in the criminal activity that we are able to tackle. When people mention, for example, kids hanging about outside the illegal shops and doing things that we think they should not be doing, the police will be there to tackle those problems.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Halesowen again for securing this debate, and I thank all Members—

[Jim Shannon]

Will the Minister give way?

[Sarah Jones]

Oh, yes—I forgot to talk about Northern Ireland.

[Jim Shannon]

I hope the Minister does not mind my asking, but would she take the time, as she often does on her visits to Northern Ireland, to engage with the Northern Ireland Justice Minister, Naomi Long? There are lots of things we can do better together, and we can share ideas, so will the Minister take that opportunity on one of her many visits to Northern Ireland?

[Sarah Jones]

Yes, of course. Forgive me; I should have responded to that earlier. The hon. Member also made the point about illicit trade across all our nations, and we need to work together to tackle that as well.

I will end just as I began, by saying that we will be judged on this when we next stand before—