‘The voice of 3 million retail workers is finally being heard on crime’

A group of three men enter a store in a sleepy village in the north of Yorkshire. It’s mid-evening, not the busiest time for this late-opening shop and so a good time for thieving.

Within the space of a minute or two, they sweep shelf-loads of goods into their bags and make a dash for the door. They pile into a car waiting on the street outside and speed off into the night with their swag. In the store, the staff make the obligatory calls as customers look on in shock.

That was the scene in one of my local convenience stores the other night, seen by family members on a visit. Coming from the big city, it was ironic that they witnessed the raid in a fairly rural village.

Or maybe not. The scourge of shop crime affects all sorts of stores in all sorts of locations. It’s not the first time my local shop has been targeted. There have been numerous occasions – it’s even been ram-raided.

“Losses from customer theft have reached £1.8bn – the highest level ever and almost double the previous figure. That’s one helluva heist”

The latest incident – which, thankfully, did not involve violence – will go into this year’s retail crime stats. One of the staff told me afterward: “[They stole] stuff they can sell door to door. If it’s not over a certain value, the police don’t do anything.”

Some of the earlier incidents at the shop would no doubt have been recorded in the last annual survey of retail crime. They’d have represented a few tiny data points in a vast pool of thefts and abuse of staff – by organised gangs as well as the opportunistic or desperate – that has flooded the industry.

According to the latest British Retail Consortium (BRC) crime report, losses from customer theft have reached £1.8bn – the highest level ever and almost double the previous figure. That’s one helluva heist.

There were more than 100 violent incidents per day at 41,000, and altogether there were 475,000. The overall cost of retail crime, including prevention measures, rose nearly twofold to £3.3bn.

So this week’s news that assaulting a retail worker will become a standalone offence, along with £55.5m of government funding for facial recognition technology to “help catch perpetrators and prevent shoplifting”, was welcome after a long campaign by the BRC and retailers ranging from the Co-op to Primark and John Lewis.

As BRC chief executive Helen Dickinson pithily put it: “The voices of the 3 million people working in retail have finally been heard.”

Tesco chief executive Ken Murphy said: “We really welcome the move. We’ve been advocates for some time that this should be the case so we’re really pleased.”

While the new offence only carries a maximum sentence of six months, there can also be unlimited fines and perpetrators can be banned from the store where they committed the assault. Offenders may also be charged if appropriate with the more serious GBH.

“The retail industry sometimes feels its voice is not heard, despite its importance as an employer and creator of wealth, and the integral role it plays in the fabric of community”

As far as the new law is concerned, the proof of the pudding will be in the eating. The charity Transform Justice told the BBC, for instance, that the creation of a specific offence might not work – it said that a similar approach to assaults on emergency workers had not resulted in a fall in the number of incidents.

We’ll see. In the meantime, retailers will echo the words of John Lewis Partnership head of security and shrinkage Nicki Juniper.

She posted on LinkedIn: “We did it!! Violence and abuse against retail workers is not victimless, and this change in the law further demonstrates that action will be taken.”

That last point is encouraging. The retail industry sometimes feels its voice is not heard, despite its importance as an employer and creator of wealth, and the integral role it plays in the fabric of community.

The new law shows that it can exert influence, giving grounds for hope that other changes – whether on the apprenticeship levy or the perennial bugbear of business rates – can be won.