Question to the Attorney General:

To ask the Attorney General, how many prosecutions there have been for shoplifting in each of the last five years.

Theft from a shop is one way in which the offence of Theft contrary to Section 1(1) & 7 of the Theft Act 1968 is committed. There is no specific offence of that title. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) does not maintain a central record of the number of prosecutions for the specific offence of shoplifting. Identifying the number of prosecutions in which there was one or more charges relating to theft from a shop would require a manual exercise to review individual files which would incur a disproportionate cost.

The CPS does maintain a central record of the number of offences of shoplifting charged under section 1 of the Theft Act 1968 in which a prosecution commenced and reached a first hearing in magistrates’ courts. It is not possible to identify the number of defendants or cases prosecuted from this data. The table below shows the number of shoplifting offences that reached a first hearing for the last five years:

The CPS’s offences data provides no indication of the final prosecution outcome, or if the charged offence was the substantive charge at the time of finalisation. It is also often the case that an individual defendant is charged with more than one offence against the same victim.