The majority of police officers did not issue a single penalty for shoplifting over the last year, new data has found, despite crime figures hitting a 20-year high.
In the year to March 2024, just 431 shoplifters were handed fixed penalty notices for theft of goods valued at under £100 – a 98% drop from a decade ago, when 19,419 were issued.
The new figures are from The Times analysis of data published by the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice and police forces.
More serious forms of punishment have also fallen sharply, The Times reports, with the use of cautions to punish shoplifters dropping from 16,281 in 2014 to 2,077 in the last year, down 87%.
There has also been a decline in the number of shoplifters pursued through the courts, with just 28,955 convictions over the last year, compared with 71,998 a decade ago.
Record-breaking high
The news comes as the number of shoplifting offences reached 443,995 in the year to March 2024, a record-breaking high.
Gail Watling, of Tidings Newsagents in Horning, Norfolk, told Better Retailing: “I’ve had shoplifters and I know for a fact when it happened I had it on CCTV, I just knew the police wouldn’t do anything.
“I reported it because I wanted the police to have it on file that something had happened. But I knew they wouldn’t do anything about it. It’s a waste of time. We’re fortunate that it’s not much of a problem in this shop, but we had a store in Norwich where a lot of shoplifting was going on, and the police would never come out.
“It’s a waste of time, you just need to have your wits about you. The shoplifters are just going to target small businesses because they’re easy picking. Even in places like Tesco the security guards are told not to chase them. It’s like giving shoplifters carte blanche to do it. They seem to be more worried about the rioters than the looters at the moment.”
Responding to The Times’ findings, Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, vowed to “end the shameful neglect” of shoplifting by the police, giving forces stronger powers through the Crime and Policing Bill, lifting the £200 threshold and banning shoplifters from town centres.
She said: “We will remove the £200 threshold, bring in stronger powers to ban repeat offenders from town centres, make assaults on shop workers a specific criminal offence, and, through our neighbourhood policing guarantee, we will put thousands more police onto our streets to crack down on shop theft, antisocial behaviour and the other crimes that blight our communities and make people feel unsafe.
“We cannot end this problem overnight. But we can end the shameful neglect of this problem that has allowed it to become an epidemic in our society.”
BIRA response
A large majority (70%) of retailers are not reporting crime to the police due to lack of faith in enforcement action, according to a recent survey by the British Independent Retailers Association (BIRA).
Jeff Moody, commercial director at BIRA, said: “We now see independent retailers seriously questioning whether to continue trading as the impact of shop theft is not just damaging their businesses economically, it is impacting on their safety and willingness to continue. Why should they open their doors to be verbally and physically abused, knowing the police will not respond.”
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