Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what information her Department holds on the number of retail workers who have experienced violent crime at work in each of the last five years.

The Home Office publishes data on the number of incidents of violent crime recorded by the police in England and Wales. The latest data can be found here:

Police recorded crime and outcomes open data tables - GOV.UK

The data includes incidents of robbery of business property, which includes robbery of retail premises as well as other business premises. Other types of violent crime against retail workers will fall under other categories of violent crime, such as assault with injury. It is not currently possible to identify which of these incidents were committed against retail workers during the course of their work.

In the Crime and Policing Bill, we are bringing forward a new offence of assaulting a retail worker to protect the hardworking and dedicated staff that work in stores.

The offence will be allocated a specific Home Office Crime Recording Rule, which will help provide a more complete picture of the problem, in turn informing future policy decisions and enabling the police to respond accordingly.

The Home Office has also published estimates from the Commercial Victimisation Survey (CVS) on the proportion of retail premises which experienced at least one incident of violent crime. This data can be found here:

Crime against businesses statistics - GOV.UK