Theft is a regressive crime where the poor suffer most

The “property” crime wave engulfing our high streets has vaulted up the national policy agenda – and rightly so. It is the ultimate enemy of levelling up for the poorest in our society.

Dame Sharon White, the Chair of John Lewis and Waitrose, has described the scale of shoplifting, violence and abuse faced by her staff as a “crime epidemic”. Usdaw, the union representing shop-workers revealed a quarter of retail staff had suffered abuse, including threats and violence, at the hands of thieves. The latest crime stats show that police recorded property crime increased substantially compared to last year – with theft from person up 28 per cent, shoplifting up 24 per cent and robbery up 13 per cent.

The term shoplifting evokes an image of the teenage girl sneaking out of Boots with mascara or a young lad pilfering a bag of sweets from under the newsagent’s nose. But talk to any shopkeeper, whether the local corner shop or one of the major retailers, and they will tell you that the errant teenager is not their real problem. What they describe is more akin to enduring a constant campaign of organised and violent looting by hardened criminals targeting highly portable goods with a solid resale value.

Baby formula is one example of the products commonly targeted. Taken at face value – that someone is stealing baby formula to feed their child would be a horrific indictment of modern Britain. Yet the more common reason that baby formula is stolen is that it is the ideal agent for cutting heroin and cocaine. Drug dealers add baby formula to bulk out their product and so deliver a more profitable return for their criminal enterprises. Alongside products such as razor blades, popular for being expensive and easily portable, and alcohol, prized for being easy to sell on, the real picture behind the explosion of this organised criminality becomes far clearer.

 The well-meaning who ignore this reality do nothing for those who live in the most difficult circumstances. The people who feel the impact of property crimes most intensely are not the rich, nor even the retailers themselves – it is the people who live in our poorest communities.

None of this is new – indeed Policy Exchange has been pushing this issue onto the agenda for years. In 2015 the now Shadow Foreign Secretary, but then backbencher, David Lammy authored two reports for Policy Exchange following on from his book on the 2011 London riots. Lammy focused on the regressive impact of property crime. His research showed that those who lived in the most deprived neighbourhoods were 45 per cent more likely to be a victim of crime than those living in the wealthiest. Many of Lammy’s recommendations are just as relevant today as they were in 2015.

The economic impact of these crimes is considerable. Costs are transferred to the poorest customers through higher prices. Rising insurance premiums become unsustainable. Staff become too scared to go to work and chose to seek employment elsewhere. We risk scenes similar to those in San Francisco, where a permissive environment towards theft, violence and abuse has led to widespread shop closures and the creation of economic wastelands across entire, mostly already poor, neighbourhoods.

Those who choose a form of benevolence towards offenders are gifting the poorest in our society a fool’s gold. Concerted action is needed.

The first step is reversing the 2014 decision to down-grade the shoplifting of goods worth less than £200 to a “summary only” offence. This is the lowest level of criminal offences, putting this type of theft on a par with speeding. This single ill-judged change has led to lighter punishments for those convicted and the police ‘deprioritising’ this type of offending. It must be reversed.

Prolific offenders must be subject to punishments which reflect both the totality of their offending and that the impact of their offending is felt far more widely than just by the businesses themselves. The law-abiding public are entitled to a break from the worst offenders; something only achieved by sending the most prolific to prison for an extended period of time.

The forces of law and order have become increasing absent when it comes to these crimes. Of the estimated 8 million offences of shoplifting committed last year, there were only 23,000 prosecutions – a quarter of the number prosecuted a decade ago and a charge rate of less than 0.3 per cent. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner recently described shoplifting as a “capacity challenge” for the police.

Government must retrieve from the long-grass the review of how it allocates funding to police forces. Cleveland Police, responsible for policing some of the most deprived towns in the country, now has 250 fewer police officers than in 2010; Surrey Police meanwhile, with some of the wealthiest towns, has 400 more police officers. Given the funding review has now been languishing in the Home Office for years, it is reasonable to ask whether the regional inequalities it has created are by design or merely incompetence.

Retailers themselves need to do all they reasonably can to protect their staff, their law-abiding customers and their own businesses. The creation, by Police and Crime Commissioner Katy Bourne, of the national Operation Pegasus partnership between businesses and policing is a step forward. Employing in-store security staff, positioning tills close to the doorway rather than to the side and using facial recognition CCTV are all reasonable steps for retailers to take.

Those with the power to do so have an obligation to stop this crime wave before it gets even worse. If the explosion in property crime on our high streets continues to escalate it will be the already poorest and most vulnerable who suffer most.

David Spencer is the Head of Crime & Justice for Policy Exchange and a former Detective Chief Inspector with the Metropolitan Police Service