The theft epidemic and ‘terrifying’ violence plaguing Britain’s shopkeepers
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Neha Patel makes an unlikely vigilante. But the 59-year-old shopkeeper, who has run convenience store the Beach Shop since the late 1990s, is on high alert.
“If you let them get away once, they will come again,” she says.
Her store is located over the bridge from the quaint town centre in Shoreham-by-Sea between the River Adur and the English Channel. She knows most of her customers well.
Not everyone who comes in is friendly, however. One incident has been hard to shake off: “This guy walked in with a mask on. I thought he was going to take a few beers and do a runner. But then he tried to jump over here,” Patel says, gesturing to the counter where she is standing.
“I pushed him off and he fell. Then he tried jumping over there,” she says, now pointing to the far end of the shop counter. “I pushed him off again.”
Patel may be a small softly spoken woman with a warm smile and grey hair, but she is fearless.
A video released by the Sussex police after the incident shows her grabbing a baseball bat and going at the robber as he makes it over the counter on the third attempt. He manages to grab some bottles of alcohol before running away with an accomplice.
“[Soon] he came back in full force. He grabbed the till, like he really pulled everything out. He just went crazy,” Patel says.
She alerted her sister who lives around the corner.
“My nephew revved his car. The guy fell and by the time he got up, my brother-in-law chased him. He tried to jump over my neighbour’s fence. My neighbour came out and just jumped on him,” she says.
It took three people putting themselves in considerable danger, CCTV footage and screaming families calling the police to put one of the men behind bars. The other faced no consequences.
In a separate incident, a shoplifter made off with £60 worth of beer.
“It does make a difference. He took it just within two minutes. That takes me almost half a day to earn,” she says.
Independent business owners like Patel can hardly afford to let thieves walk away, but many in the town have lost all faith in the law.
Instead they rely on hidden hammers, baseball bats and WhatsApp groups to alert each other and ask for help.
“Nothing gets done. Police don’t come out, [they’re] not very interested. We had three break-ins on this road this week alone. Not many shops here make a profit. We have lost three recently,” says Nigel Wareham, who runs Alchemy Antiques in the town centre.
On the morning of the election a picture of an ordinary-looking couple in their 50s relieving a charity shop of goods was making the rounds on the local group chat.
“It is becoming a lawless town,” Wareham says.
Shoplifting hits new highs
Shoreham-by-Sea is at the forefront of a retail theft epidemic gripping Britain, as shoplifting soars to a record high.
The number of reported cases in England and Wales hit 430,104 last year, according to the Office for National Statistics, the highest since records began in 2003.
Outside Westminster, the district of Adur that is home to Shoreham-by-Sea had the joint-highest rate relative to the population, at 22 offences for every 1,000 people.
Neighbouring Worthing, and Mansfield further afield in Nottinghamshire, shared the unwanted crown.
Sussex Police meanwhile had the second lowest solved rate for shoplifting at 10pc, ranking only behind the Metropolitan Police.
In Shoreham Central and Beach, 97.6pc of reported shoplifting incidents were unsolved, Telegraph analysis shows.
Many businesses all across the country will know these issues all too well. As theft rates have soared, rates of those being solved have plummeted.
Only one in seven incidents of shoplifting in England and Wales were solved last year, according to Home Office figures. The figure has halved since comparable records were first published in 2016 and is now at its lowest.
It is not just shoplifting that is on the rise. Robberies of businesses have also risen to the highest level since 2005.
A creaking justice system, large cuts to policing and prisons on the verge of having to turn guilty people away have laid the foundations for this crisis.
The cost of living, rising levels of addiction and organised criminals seizing the opportunity to steal with impunity have made it worse.
Sir Keir Starmer faces many pressing matters in his unenviable in-tray as Britain’s new prime minister.
Retail crime may feel like it pales in comparison with repairing crumbling schools and hospitals, finding more money for the armed forces or tackling small boats.
But the cost of soaring theft in the absence of law and order is also starting to rack up.
Retailers across the UK will lose nearly £2bn to customer theft in 2024, the British Retail Consortium estimates. It is close to double last year’s figure.
Business owners like Patel face an added “theft tax” of 10p for every transaction, according to the Association of Convenience Stores.
It comes as thousands of prisoners will be released early in September to relieve overcrowding.
Britain’s prisons are believed to be just weeks away from running out of space, a situation that Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood blamed on the previous government and said had left left her with “no choice” but to take action.
As a result, some offenders will be released after serving only 40pc of their sentence rather than half. Exemptions will be made for sexual and serious violent offenders.
The alternative would risk “looters running amok, smashing in windows, robbing shops”, Mahmoud said. However, this is not far from what British retailers say they are already seeing.
Sir Keir Starmer has set out ambitious missions to “kickstart economic growth” and “take back our streets” by restoring faith in policing.
A marker of the new Prime Minister’s success will be whether he is able to make shopkeepers in places like Shoreham-by-Sea feel safe again.
‘Terrifying’ levels of violence
Stealing was not always this easy. While most crimes have fallen over time, shoplifting has increased.
Since 2010, policing, courts and prisons have experienced large cuts – and even though police officer numbers have subsequently risen to their highest level since at least 2006, the effects are still being felt.
Many officers are inexperienced, have had to deal with a surge in violent and sexual crime and spend less time policing neighbourhoods.
“There is a whole raft of social issues that underpin the elevated rate of theft and associated violence,” says Prof Emmeline Taylor, one of Britain’s leading experts on retail crime.
“Austerity measures meant that we were seeing record levels of homelessness and substance abuse at the same time that social services were being retracted. Then the pandemic hit.
“What was already an upward trajectory was just catapulted into a whole different category,” she adds.
Broadly speaking, there are three types of shoplifters, the professor says. Some are struggling to afford living costs. Prices have risen by a fifth in three years and housing costs have soared.
“That spearheaded a rise in shop theft amongst people who wouldn’t typically steal,” she says.
Then there are repeat offenders stealing to fund an addiction. Someone having to feed a £19,000-a-year dependency on heroin and crack could easily need to shoplift for £57,000, given the reduced value of stolen goods.
A rehabilitation programme of 27 prolific addiction-driven offenders in Birmingham claims to have saved the town’s retailers £800,000 in the year to July 2022, underlining the staggering costs.
Meanwhile, hardened criminals have started to take note.
“Why run the risk of running drugs and firearms or even trafficking people when you could actually just target retail and seemingly just get away with it?” Prof Taylor says.
James Lowman, the chief executive of the convenience store trade body ACS, echoes this concern.
“There’s almost been a sense that the hassle and risk in committing a burglary are not worth it when you can just walk in and steal so easily. Going back a while we talked about burglary a lot with our members. Now, they talk about theft and violence,” Lowman says.
While people like Patel are clearly hard to frighten, there is a real threat that the financial loss and emotional toll will prompt some to call it quits, he adds.
“There is a real feeling of powerlessness by retailers,” Lowman says. “A lot of the areas where our members trade are housing estates or villages away from major centres. We provide a broad range of services in those locations – post offices, bill payments, cash machines and in some cases pharmacy collections.
“If those places become too dangerous or expensive to trade because of crime those businesses will leave and all of those services will be lost.”
Stephanie Karté, from the pressure group Retailers Against Crime, warns that the proceeds from shop theft often fund further organised crime such as “drugs, firearms, prostitution”.
“We got wind of a specific person who was travelling around various supermarkets throughout the UK. At one point he was arrested setting up a brothel in Manchester,” she says.
Little is known about what happens to the stolen goods. Chances are you may have bought some unknowingly yourself.
Restaurants and cafes have been found to buy stolen meat and alcohol to increase their mark-up.
“What we are seeing day-on-day is organised crime groups basically pilfering stores for thousands and thousands of pounds, sometimes emptying perfume cabinets, shelves of for example sun lotion, building up to £2,000 theft in say five minutes. This is basically their job,” Karté says. “The sheer volume of what they are taking can’t be sold in a pub.”
The Co-op knows of criminals setting up stalls full of stolen goods and selling them on.
“It’s not people who are struggling to make ends meet that are doing the stealing in the main, but I think the cost of living crisis has created a market for cheaper stolen goods,” says Paul Gerrard from Co-op.
“In addition to a bigger market, for a much longer period police have deprioritised this completely,” he says.
Co-op’s company policy is that only undercover security guards are allowed to detain shoplifters – to keep staff safe from harm.
“Even when we had them in our custody and just needed the police to come and complete the arrest, the police weren’t turning up eight times out of 10, which means we had to let them go.”
This rate has improved slightly to six in ten since October last year when the police published its first retail action plan, Gerrard says.
The violence faced by staff is also at terrifying levels.
“Today, four of my colleagues were physically attacked. Half of those were with a weapon. We have had colleagues who’ve lost sight in their eye, miscarried and had broken bones. We’ve had to move colleagues from their homes because they were followed and threatened. You can see the mental strain that brings,” he says.
‘We can’t all afford trained security’
All of these factors mean shop owners in the likes of Shoreham-by-Sea are left with a wave of crime on their doorstep.
Those bearing the biggest brunt of the rise in theft and robberies are typically stores selling alcohol, food and other goods that can easily be sold on.
Jess Ortega-Parkin, 45, a supermarket worker and craft maker, says she routinely sees shoplifters clearing out the entire meat, alcohol and laundry detergent aisles in the Co-op where she works.
She is under orders not to intervene. Besides, “I don’t get paid enough [to risk my life],” she says.
“If you were hungry you would just take what you wanted to eat. You wouldn’t take the whole meat section and shove it down your jumper,” she says.
“They’ll go down the washing aisle, put all of the washing pods, all that stuff in their basket and walk out. One time I approached someone and said ‘put that stuff back’. He was like ‘You can report it’. He was quite scary,” she says.
“People will take a box of beers. Then they’ll come back later in the day and take another one. We’re not allowed to do anything,” she adds.
Shoplifting under £200 is treated as a summary offence, which should be handled through a penalty notice fine of just £70 without the thief having to turn up at magistrates. “There’s evidence people make sure that they steal things under that value,” says Graham Wynn from the BRC.
A young woman working in a convenience store selling alcohol near the station just shrugs and gestures to a smashed window in the door when asked about shoplifting. The window shattered when someone physically attacked a colleague, she explains.
“We get it loads, I’d say every day, all of the time. It is quite bad here to be honest. Sometimes they can be aggressive. We had someone practically empty that quite recently. He just kept putting it all in a bag,” she says, gesturing towards the wine section.
The chilled alcohol cupboards have chain locks. There is a protective box with a locked door around the entire till where she stands, with spirits and tobacco held there. It does little to protect her.
“I had one the other day. They unlocked this door and came in front of me and took all the vapes and vodkas and stuff,” she says.
She called the police on that occasion, but it was an exception. “We can’t call the police every time,” she says.
All over town, store owners talk of the same struggle.
“It is mentally demoralising. It affects you in so many ways. Not every independent shop has the financial ability to hire trained security,” says Aylinn Cruz.
She runs a co-operative vintage shop alongside other makers and also has a store in Brighton. A man tried to walk out with his hand full of her products not long ago.
“I was so mad. He turned around, threw everything on the ground and walked off. But that was only when I went back into the shop to grab my baseball bat,” she says.
“You’re not allowed to keep any weapons in your shop. I don’t care. At some point, you have to if you want to keep operating.”
Even charity shops routinely come up against shoplifters who feel they can steal with impunity.
One charity shop experienced someone stealing a high-end leather jacket, only to come back wearing it later the same day with the view to take something else.
In another, Carylon Shrosbree says shoplifters will steal art made by her staff with learning disabilities and donations.
“We find empty hangers. Someone stole one of our staff member’s prints the other week. And did he come back the next week for more? Yes, he did. I asked him to pay for it. He then started pretending to collapse,” she says.
“It’s just like stealing to order. It’s nothing to do with being on hard times. It’s just a way of life and mentality,” says Marisol Greenslade in Independent Age on the High Street.
“In the old days you used to have a bobby on the beat walking around. Now no one cares. There is no comeback,” adds her co-worker.
Smaller independents feel supermarkets are making things worse by allowing shoplifters to walk away with their hands full.
Gerrard, who works in Co-op’s head office, rejects this. “The idea that the Co-op is facilitating this is frankly bizarre because they are blaming the victim here,” he says.
The town has a problem with children and teenagers sometimes as young as eleven terrorising stores, shop owners say.
“They have this air about them that nothing can be done. ‘You can’t touch me’,” says another independent shopkeeper, who was stormed by eight youths threatening to beat her up some time ago.
Several shop owners mention the “Eyelash Gang”, a group of young girls who earned the nickname locally after attacking multiple shops.
“I still feel anxious if I see someone with long fake eyelashes,” one shop owner says. Many are afraid to speak up and name their shops for fear of revenge.
“I don’t want a brick through my window. That’s how it is in Shoreham at the moment,” another one remarks.
Another familiar with the challenge is vape store manager Harvey Winter, 30, who runs Wildfire Vape.
“We’d have a string of about four to eight maybe 14-year-old girls just storming the shop and trying to get disposables. Obviously being young girls, I can’t exactly do anything so they just kept doing it.
“Last week we got burgled as well, and they were all schoolchildren. They just did it for the sake of it by the looks of things,” he says.
“Even with the burglary, contacting the police nothing happens,” Winter says.
Labour faces funding crisis
Tackling the rise in retail theft will be no easy feat for Labour. Its manifesto includes a long list of pledges aimed at restoring the wider system dealing with criminals, from apprehension to rehabilitation.
Promises range from boosting the numbers of neighbourhood police officers, banning persistent antisocial offenders from town centres and reducing court backlogs by allowing lower-ranking prosecutors to take on greater responsibilities.
Starmer has announced an impressive line up of ministers to oversee these areas, with businessman and former Prison Reform Trust chair James Timpson grabbing headlines.
But the dire state of public finances means there is little money to throw at a creaking system that has become so slow and dysfunctional it is inadvertently encouraging crime.
Labour has so far committed to spending plans that assume £19bn of cuts from 2025-26 to 2028-29 to all “unprotected” public services.
Analysis by the Institute for Government (IfG) shows this would entail real terms cuts of 5.6pc to prisons, 3.5pc to courts and 3.2pc to police.
“If they did deliver those cuts you would probably end up having to reduce the number of police officers again. You would have to cut what limited resettlement and rehabilitative activity exists in prisons. Probation and the court backlog would probably continue to get worse.
“It is just not doable without a massive public backlash,” says Cassia Rowland from IfG.
She believes Starmer will somehow find the money given the scale of concern. But even so, more funding is unlikely to amount to much more than keeping services at their current – poor – level.
Dame Vera Baird, who chaired an expert commission on crime set up by Labour, says all these factors will force a deeper conversation about what people want the police to do.
“[The police] have always had to prioritise. The difference now is they’re much weaker, much less experienced, there is a surfeit of crime and an atmosphere of poverty and hopelessness that adds to it.”
She believes these factors have helped pave the way for the surge in shoplifting – but equally make prioritising it over other types of crime all the more difficult.
“The criminals are very well aware that the criminal justice system is log jammed. They move to what is the easiest and the most profitable at any given time,” she says.
“If we’re in a state where not much crime is being pursued generally, it is very hard to see how you bring shoplifting up to a different level of priority.”
However she warns this will leave deprived communities to suffer the most.
“If this kind of economic damage continues because the criminal justice system is weak then where does it leave some communities with their local shops they need and where does it leave local businesses that we all value so much?,” she asks.
Dame Vera is a barrister and former Labour MP who was previously police and crime commissioner for Northumbria and Victims’ Commissioner for England and Wales.
She remains “optimistic” that Labour can change things, but warns “you can’t rely on the criminal justice system changing very quickly”.
“The businesses are going to have to find some ways of deterrence and prevention themselves,” she says.
She mentions things like shops sharing intelligence and banding together to pay for private security. There may also be a case for trialling some form of “town centre agreements”, with large retailers contributing to measures to protect high streets.
Retailers say making the assault of retail workers a standalone offence and introducing tougher punishments for shoplifting would help.
The Conservatives announced a plan to do this in April, but then the election was called. Labour has long supported it.
“I am absolutely expecting that one of the first things that they will do is legislate to make attacking shop workers a standalone offence. I think that is totemic to how important and how seriously a Labour government will take this,” says Gerrard.
There are examples too of the public and private sector pulling together ministers can look to. In Sussex, police and crime commissioner Katy Bourne says they are working directly with the worst-affected supermarkets.
More than 20 of the most targeted Co-op stores can now report theft at the touch of a button.
“The police are very data driven and they will put their resources where they see the increase in reports,” she says. “We’re now working with the stores to ensure they give us as much detail as they possibly can, so we can action it. I have seen as a result our solved rates start to go up,” Bourke says.
On a national level, she is working on a police unit funded by retailers to investigate organised crime groups behind mass shoplifting.
Shop owners hoping for change may have to be patient. Back on the High Street in Shoreham-by-Sea, business owners have mixed feelings about whether a new government can deliver for them.
“One can only hope that they have got to be better than what is happening now,” says Shrosbree in charity shop SOLD.
Wareham, who manages the antique store, is less convinced. “I don’t understand where we’ve lost what’s right and what’s wrong. It’s become a way of life,” he says.
