Retail Crime: Effects

Lord Godson Excerpts

Thursday 5th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[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?