Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment she has made of the (a) implications for her policies of and (b) the potential impact of increases in the cost of living on trends in the level of shoplifting incidents.

The Home Office works closely with retailers and trade organisations such as the British Retail Consortium (BRC), Association of Convenience Stores (ACS) and the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers (USDAW), and police partners via the National Retail Crime Steering Group (NRCSG) to understand the crime trends retailers are experiencing. Recent discussions at the NRCSG have included the impact of the cost of living on crime such as shoplifting, and we continue to keep this under review.

The NRCSG has produced practical resources to provide guidance on partnership working and encourage engagement with Business Crime Reduction Partnerships (BCRPs) to help ensure businesses and police can work effectively together to identify the trends and types of crimes that affect businesses and to ensure incidents are dealt with appropriately.

We also work closely with the police-led National Business Crime Centre (NBCC) to help prevent crime against businesses. The NBCC has undertaken a number of Safer Action Business Days (SABA) across the country, where police, BCRPs and retailers work in partnership to carry out days of action to deliver a focussed operation with joint patrols, targeted intervention
of offenders and a range of crime prevention activities.

Police recorded offences in England and Wales (excluding Devon and Cornwall) for shoplifting and all theft offences for year ending December 2022 are showing a fall of 12% and 13% respectively compared with the pre-pandemic period of March 2020.

Volumes data for shoplifting from police recorded crime (PRC) data should be interpreted with caution due to under reporting of shoplifting. Therefore, the volumes presented here are likely to underestimate the true level of shoplifting.