Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what her planned timetable is for bringing forward legislative proposals to tackle retail crime.

Shoplifting has increased at an unacceptable level in recent years, with more and more offenders using violence and abuse against shopworkers to do this. We will not stand for this. Everybody has a right to feel safe on the job.

To that end, this Government will end the effective immunity, introduced by the previous Government, granted to low level shoplifting of goods under £200.

We will also introduce a new offence of assaulting a retail worker to protect the hardworking and dedicated staff that work in stores.

We encourage closer local partnerships between police and retailers ensuring action can be taken, including reporting crime and considering what appropriate action, including non-custodial interventions, can be taken. We urge retailers to join their local Business Crime Reduction Partnership (BCRP) or Business Improvement District (BID) to support local community efforts to reduce retail crime.

The Home Office supports Pegasus, a unique private-public partnership, that is improving the way retailers share intelligence with policing, to better understand the tactics used by organised retail crime gangs and identify more offenders.

The Home Office collects and publishes information on the number of shoplifting offences recorded by the police in England and Wales on a quarterly basis. There have been approximately 1.5 million shoplifting offences recorded in England in the last 5 years, of which 7737 were for the York area.

We are committed to preventing young people being lured into crime, drugs and criminal gangs and the Government has made clear its commitment to introduce a new offence to tackle child criminal exploitation.

County Lines is the most violent model of drug supply and a harmful form of Child Criminal Exploitation. The County Lines Programme is funded by the Home Office to tackle this, resulting in over 5,600 county line closures, 16,500 arrests and 8,800 safeguarding referrals