Shoplifting

(asked on 4th March 2020) - View Source

Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent steps she has taken to reduce the number of shoplifting incidents in (a) Slough and (b) the UK.


Answered by
Kit Malthouse Portrait
Kit Malthouse
This question was answered on 23rd March 2020

Through the National Retail Crime Steering Group, we bring retailers and police together to tackle retail crime. We are encouraging closer local partnerships between police and retailers so that better crime prevention measures are put in place by retailers and local police respond effectively to crimes reported.

In 2014 the government also changed the law to enable cases of theft from a shop of goods with a value of £200 or less to be dealt with as summary-only offences. This enables certain cases of shop theft to be dealt with as swiftly and efficiently as possible, enabling the police to prosecute uncontested cases in the future.

It is for Chief Constables and Police and Crime Commissioners, as operational leaders and elected local representatives, to decide how best to respond to individual crimes and local crime priorities but to help ensure that the police have the resources they need to do so, we are recruiting 20,000 officers over the next three years. In October 2019, Home Office confirmed officer allocations for every force in England and Wales in the first year of the uplift. Thames Valley Police has been allocated 183 officers in year one of the uplift, to be recruited by the end of March 2021. Decisions on the allocation of officers for years two and three are yet to be taken. More information can be found on:

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/home-office-announces-first-wave-of-20000-police-officer-uplift

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