Research shows five-fold increase in theft and violence against shopworkers doubles
The scale of rising retail crime has been revealed as the UK’s local shops recorded 5.6million incidents of theft over the past year – over five times the amount in the previous 12 months.
The figures come from the just-released 2024 Crime Report by the Association Of Convenience Stores (ACS) – which campaigns for over 33,500 local shops, the vast majority of which sell greeting cards.
With the 5.6m figure working out at more than 600 incidents of theft an hour, against last year’s total 1.1m incidents, the report also reveals violence has almost doubled to around 76,000 altercations in shops compared to 41,000 in the 2023 report.
Retailers are fighting back by investing in crime prevention and theft detection measures, with £339million spent over the past year in areas such as CCTV, security staff, intruder alarms and internal communication systems – an average of £6,838 per store.
But only 42% of all retail crimes are reported to the police as with the three main reasons for shopkeepers not bothering being that they have no confidence in a follow-up investigation, there’s a perceived lack of interest from police, and it takes too much time to file and process the reports.
The report states: “We welcome that the vast majority of police and crime commissioners now reference business crime in their police and crime plans. However, much more progress is needed. Retailers are dissatisfied with the ease of reporting incidents to the police, which leads to underreporting.”
And it references the ACS’ Stop Shop Theft Campaign, supported by the British Retail Consortium and British Independent Retailers’ Association, aimed at persuading police forces to tell retailers how they should be reporting incidents and who is their single point of contact for business crime.
The cost of shop crime and investment in fighting it adds up to a 10p crime tax on every store transaction in the UK, a significant rise from the 6p in last year’s report.
The research also reveals 87% of convenience store staff have faced verbal abuse over the past year, with the main trigger being encountering shop thieves, and 67% of retailers believe the ongoing cost-of-living squeeze has led to an increase in theft.
ACS ceo James Lowman said: “Retailers are facing an onslaught of crime committed against their businesses on a daily basis, with some losing tens of thousands of pounds per year to theft alone.
“This extended crimewave cannot be allowed to continue. Thieves are known to the community and to the police but they simply do not care, and continue on regardless, filling baskets and trolleys and walking out without fear of reproach.”
The association is calling on central government to support stores in tackling the retail crime crisis by imposing effective sanctions on offenders to deliver justice for shopworkers, focus additional police resources on neighbourhood policing to keep communities safe, and to support further investment in technology to deter and detect criminals.
