Things have changed in my local sandwich shop. Every so often, in the middle of ringing through my americano, the server will go stock still, like a savannah predator who has spotted a tiny rustling movement in the grass. Then, whiskers twitching, he will suddenly dart out from behind the counter and rush after some youth who has just made it out of the door, swipe their pilfered lunch from their hands in one practised movement, and then return with the spoils: a Coke, say, or a chicken wrap, to general applause. He doesn’t appear to have been harmed, yet, by his light-fingered customers — but I do worry about him. It seems to be getting worse.
What is behind the huge rise in shoplifting? Between 2022 and 2023, according to the British Retail Consortium, it more than doubled to 16.7 million incidents, leaving shops £1.8 billion short. The crimes affect businesses small and large, but also the people who work in them and local communities. An atmosphere of lawlessness can spread.
Labour has fingered a culprit: this week Yvette Cooper put the blame on what she called a “shoplifters’ charter” — a change brought in under Theresa May which made lifting an item under £200 a mere “summary offence”, intended to speed things up and take the burden off the courts: police can deal with it themselves.
Cooper has argued that this cut deterrents and has therefore encouraged more crime. And as well as ramping up punishments, Labour would put more bobbies on the beat: their “community policing guarantee” would mean 13,000 more police and community officers on the job — to crack down on shoplifting.
The real culprits behind the rise in shoplifting may be among its victims: large chain stores
But will this work? It will certainly come with costs. Removing the lesser “summary offence” will mean shoplifters will have to be sent through the court system, putting more strain on a service which already has a vast backlog. Ramping up deterrents for this relatively low-level crime will also send vulnerable people to jail.
Police, meanwhile, are already so overstretched they are compromising on mental health support and house burglaries. Do they have time to pore over shop CCTV footage and loiter outside retailers? Can we afford the resources this would absorb. And even if we could, would it help?
It will be hard in any case for the Tories to object to this approach; both parties want to believe the solution lies in the justice system. Both are concerned to be seen as tough on crime, which generally means enforcing harsher sentences.
But stricter rules mean little if you can’t catch offenders in the first place. And this is hard to do, even with far more police on the case. First, shoplifting is generally done surreptitiously within the store — the steak in the coat pocket, the baby formula in the nappy bag — but shops are not public spaces, so police can’t follow suspicious people down the aisles. All they can do is patrol past the door — an obstacle the practiced shoplifter can overcome by waiting until they pass. Police can’t frisk everyone on the way out.
Here’s the problem that neither party can face up to. The real culprits behind the rise in shoplifting may also be among its victims: large chain stores. And the real solution may not in fact lie with the justice system. Let me explain.
While automation has generally reduced crime — new locking systems have virtually eliminated car theft — in large chain stores it has done the opposite. A rise in sensors and self-checkout, particularly during the pandemic, has saved these shops money on staff but has created losses elsewhere: it has made it much easier to steal things. Why didn’t these shops put people straight back behind the tills once they realised what was going on? Well, perhaps they were making a cost-benefit calculation — writing off stock shrinkage against savings in salaries.
Fair enough, but what if it is the lawlessness generated by these policies that has now resulted in thefts in my local sandwich shop? Once theft becomes normalised, it can spread. It is unfair for large retailers to strip their shops of staff and then place the burden of resulting crimes on the state. It is equally unfair that smaller retailers are now bearing costs too (chain store employees don’t and shouldn’t risk themselves chasing after thieves — small business owners can’t afford not to).
Perhaps the solution is not more police outside shops, but more people on the till?
Martha Gill is an Evening Standard columnist