Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent assessment her Department has made of levels of theft from shops (a) nationally and (b) in Suffolk.

The Home Office works closely with retailers and trade associations 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 and to work together to tackle these issues.

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 at a local level.

In addition, the National Business Crime Centre (NBCC) co-ordinates Safer Action Business Days (SABA), where police, BCRPs and retailers work in partnership to carry out days of action to prevent crime against businesses, including shoplifting.

The Home Office collects and publishes information on the number of shoplifting offences reported to and recorded by the police in England and Wales, on a quarterly basis. These are available at Police Force Area and can be accessed here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/police-recorded-crime-open-data-tables

The table below shows the police recorded crime figures for Suffolk

Many shoplifting offences are not reported to the police. The 2021 Commercial Victimisation Survey, which provides estimates of crime against the Wholesale and Retail sector in England and Wales, showed that 25% of premises were victims of theft by customers in the 12 months prior to taking part in the survey. Of those victims, 39% said they experienced customer theft once a week or more.