Shoplifting is not a victimless crime, and incidents are the rise, as shown by the latest data from the Office for National Statistics. It found that overall theft offences recorded by police may have decreased by 4%, but there’s been a sharp 13% rise in shoplifting in the year to the end of June 2025, with 529,994 offences recorded.
Lucy Whing, crime policy adviser at the British Retail Consortium (BRC), said: “Theft is a major issue for retailers, costing more than £2.2bn a year… the causes are manifold, but the rise in organised crime is a particular concern, with gangs systematically hitting stores one after another, all over the country.”
The British Independent Retailers Association (Bira) – says that the data aligns with its own recent crime survey of its independent retailers, “which revealed that 83% say theft has worsened over the past year, with physical abuse incidents nearly doubling.”
And Whing agrees: “Theft is also a major trigger for violence and abuse against staff. Incidents of violence and abuse have risen to more than 2000 per day. These incidents are not restricted to those working in stores: new figures from the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers (Usdaw) revealed that more than three-quarters of delivery drivers have been a victim of abuse and more than one in 10 have been assaulted over the last twelve months.”
Bira reckons that the vast majority of crimes now go unreported – 91% of physical abuse incidents and 47% of thefts – “because retailers have lost faith in police response.”
And this may be because of a widely held view that police do not investigate crimes and thefts valued at under £200, which follows from section 22A of the Magistrates’ Courts Act 1980, which defines low-value thefts.
While the lack of police action may be unofficially the case in parts of the UK, some police and crime commissioners (PCCs) have made it clear that this figure – and the lack of activity surrounding it – are a myth.
In August 2024, Hertfordshire PCC Jonathan Ash-Edwards asked Chief Constable Charlie Hall about the misconception. He asked during a regular public webinar whether it’s true that the police don’t investigate cases where the value is under £200. Hall replied: “It is a complete public myth and is categorically not true. We have no policy around a £200 limit, and we’re not going to. We are charging and putting before the court people who have committed shoplifting well below the £200 figure.”
And two months later, Northumbria PCC, Susan Dungworth, debunked what she described as “harmful rumours.”
Chief Inspector Ian Blakemore, Northumbria Police’s retail crime lead, echoed this and gave Dunkworth a categorical reassurance that there was no lower limit on the police’s ability to investigate shoplifting, saying, “We take every report of theft very seriously and we carefully assess the risk to determine the best course of action.”
Carefully chosen words are detailed in public forums, but the public isn’t sure. And it’s one of the reasons why the government is planning to repeal section 22A in a new Crime and Policing Bill. The government says that this “will ensure that all offences are tried as ‘general theft’ with a maximum custodial sentence of seven years, instead of summarily in the magistrates’ court, unless the defendant elects for jury trial.”
As currently proposed, the bill will also “create a standalone offence for assaulting a retail worker to protect staff, measure the scale of the problem and drive down retail crime,” punishable with a maximum penalty of six months in prison, and/or an unlimited fine.
Will it help? The BRC and the retail crime prevention firm Facewatch think it certainly will, the latter describing it as “a much-needed step forward in tackling the UK’s retail crime epidemic.”
However, the statistics will, in time, determine the truth.