Shoplifting epidemic sees three thefts every minute

Telegraph

4 days ago

Nearly three thefts a minute are being reported by shops amid a growing shoplifting epidemic, official figures show.
Shoplifting hit a record high of 530,643 offences reported to police in the year to March, a 20 per cent increase on the previous year's total of 444,022.
The rate of shoplifting is nearly double the rate two decades ago, according to the figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
That equates to more than 10,000 thefts a week, or more than 1,400 a day and nearly three per minute based on average UK store opening times of 9am to 6pm.
The figures are the highest since records began in March 2003, with retailers warning the crisis adds at least 6p to every store transaction by customers.
The British Retail Consortium calculates losses at £1.8bn stolen each year, with a further £700m spent on extra security.
The police-recorded figures are estimated to represent just 5 per cent of the total amount stolen as most shops only report to police when they catch an offender in the act or have evidence such as CCTV.
Snatch thefts of phones and bags hit a 20-year high of 90,000 over the year to March 2025, the second-highest total on record, according to the Crime Survey for England and Wales, which records people's personal experience of crime.
That is up 29 per cent on 70,000 over the year to March 2024, and is the highest recorded figure since 106,000 in 2003/04.
The surge follows warnings by police that they could be dragged away from tackling crimes like shoplifting and theft in order keep the peace at migration protests this summer.
Earlier this month, Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, announced plans for extra officers to be deployed on the streets of 500 towns in a summer blitz on shoplifting and anti-social behaviour by 'thugs and thieves'.
Stores including M&S, Morrisons, Boots, Tesco, Primark, and Greggs are also rolling out a new scheme where they submit CCTV, photos and personal data on all their repeat shoplifters to a database that is shared with police.
The shared data enables all the stores and police to 'join the dots' to identify prolific offenders, gather evidence for prosecutions and provide security staff on the shop doors with photo watchlists to bar entry.
Home Office figures suggest that police are bringing more shoplifters to justice. The proportion of shoplifting offences resulting in a charge has increased from 17.9 per cent last year to 19.2 per cent in the year to March 2025.
It follows an agreement last October between the Government and police where forces pledged to attend shoplifting cases if there was violence against a store worker, a suspected thief was detained or officers were needed to secure evidence.
Ms Cooper said: 'The four-year increase in shop theft and street crime reflects the decimation of neighbourhood policing over the past decade.
'That is why this summer our new Neighbourhood Policing Guarantee means over 500 town centres are getting extra neighbourhood patrols and action on town centre crime, and we are delivering the first 3,000 increase in neighbourhood officers and PCSOs in communities by next spring.'
Chris Philp, the Tory shadow home secretary, said: 'Following yesterday's damning drop in police numbers, today the consequences of Labour's negligence are on full show.
'Under Labour, crime is up seven per cent, shoplifting has surged by 20 per cent, and under Labour's London Mayor, over 60 per cent of all personal thefts now happen in the capital.'
ONS data also showed that around one in eight women were victims of sexual assault, domestic abuse or stalking in the last year.
Around one in 10 people aged 16 and over in England and Wales were victims of at least one of the crime types of domestic abuse, sexual assault or stalking in the year to March, new estimates suggest.
The survey found 5.2 million men and women aged 16 and over (10.6 per cent) were likely to have experienced one or more of these types of crime – but the percentage was higher for women (12.8 per cent) as opposed to 8.4 per cent of men.
It is the first time an estimate has been made of the prevalence of these three crimes and is the main measure used by the ONS to monitor the Government's ambition of halving violence against women and girls (VAWG) in a decade.
The Home Office will provide more detail later this year on how this will be used with other statistics to monitor its progress.
The individual breakdown of the prevalence of crime listed on the survey suggests 2.9 per cent of the population, which accounts for 1.4 million people, have experienced stalking.
Some 7.8 per cent (around 3.8 million people) experienced domestic abuse, while 1.9 per cent (around 900,000 people) experienced sexual assault.
Around 8.6 per cent of the population (some 4.2 million people) experienced some form of harassment.
Separate figures from the ONS Crime Survey for England and Wales published on Thursday suggest people aged 16 and over experienced 9.4 million incidents of crime in the year to March 2025, up from 8.8 million in the previous 12 months.
The rise is mainly because of a 31 per cent rise in fraud, which accounts for 4.2 million incidents and is the highest estimate for this type of crime since fraud was first measured in the survey in 2016/17.
The overall total of 9.4 million incidents in 2024/25 is 16 per cent lower than the total of 11.2 million for 2016/17, however.
Experiences of theft, criminal damage and violence with or without injury, as measured by the ONS survey, have been on a broad downward trend since the mid-1990s.
Police forces recorded 6.6 million crimes in England and Wales in 2024/25, down slightly by one per cent from 6.7 million in 2023/24.
The total is up from 6.1 million in the pre-pandemic year of 2019/20, and from 4.2 million a decade earlier in 2014/15.