Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what the cost of retail crime was to businesses in each year for which data is available.

The Home Office does not hold the information requested.

The Home Office runs an annual Commercial Victimisation Survey (CVS) which asks business premises in different sectors about their experience of various crime types, including fraud, in the latest year.

In order to keep the length of the survey, and hence the burden on respondents, to a minimum, businesses are only asked about the cost of the latest incident of each crime type experienced in the year. Therefore, it is not possible to provide an aggregate cost of fraud or overall crime to businesses in the retail sector.