The town that’s hitting back against shoplifting ...Middle East

Richard Barker, a bike shop-owner in Castleford, was sick and tired of thieves targeting businesses in his town, with one violent thug even taking a hammer to shop windows.

Castleford in West Yorkshire, the birthplace of sculptor Henry Moore, was a town in decline after the collapse of heavy industry. Street-drinking and low-level antisocial behaviour was blighting the high street. Despite a £24m Town Fund award from the Conservatives for regeneration, locals were staying away.

Barker decided to hit back, setting up a group of like-minded shopkeepers to track the people making their life a misery. “It didn’t matter what the fund was intended to do, if you didn’t clean some of those things up, then people were still not going to come in because of what they were seeing,” Barker told The i Paper.

Membership of his Castleford Town Centre Business Review Group grew from 12 in 2020 to 70 now. They have a WhatsApp group to help identify thieves quickly; because members can pool CCTV images, the police are able to secure more convictions.

The group now meets regularly and has secured cash for a two-way radio system in shops to speed up response time to shoplifting, with two Police and Community Support Officers keeping tabs on crime in real time.

“Because everybody’s taking accountability for their own areas, we finally feel like we’re getting somewhere,” Barker said. It’s an example of a community striking back against the blight of shoplifting.

Castleford also happens to be a town in Home Secretary Yvette Cooper’s Yorkshire and Humber constituency and has been instrumental in her thinking behind efforts on one of Labour’s five guiding missions: Take Back Our Streets.

Head to any town centre around the country and you’ll hear a similar story: shoplifting is out of control. In England and Wales, two items are stolen a minute according to Home Office figures. Meanwhile the British Retail Consortium reports violence and abuse against shopworkers rose by 50 per cent in the 12 months to September, with more than 2,000 incidents on average every day.

The Office for National Statistics figures show that in England and Wales there are more than 9,000 shoplifting offences a week, or 1,290 a day, with the figures at their highest since records began in March 2003. And it’s not, as some shoplifters kid themselves, a victimless crime. Retailers say theft adds at least 6p to every store transaction by customers.

On Tuesday, Cooper will publish a new Policing and Crime Bill to reverse the so-called “shoplifter’s’ charter” introduced in 2014, by which theft of goods under £200 is considered “low value”. The Government is seeking to reverse the trend of increasingly brazen and violent acts of theft because perpetrators don’t fear any consequences. The number of fixed penalty notices handed out decreased by 98 per cent over the decade to 2024.

The change introduced by the Tories meant that even though shoplifters could still in theory be imprisoned by a magistrate, it was a de facto decriminalisation of low-level offences. There are several reasons why shoplifting cases in England and Wales sky-rocketed to a 20-year high, including fuelling drug addictions, organised gangs and a cost of living crisis.

This isn’t just the crime of weighing out oranges and paying for cheaper apples at the self-service till, although ministers hope that removing the £200 limit will make shoppers think twice before stealing. It’s also about tackling the gangs who routinely swarm into supermarkets and town centres like hyenas, attacking shop security and overwhelming local police resources.

Police forces will be encouraged to be better connected because a gang in Bristol can organise a wave of crime in, say, Stoke to overwhelm shopkeepers before moving to fresh pickings elsewhere.

Shoplifters are desperate - and it's up to supermarkets to help

Catherine Atkinson, the newly elected Labour MP for Derby North, is excited about the changes coming to the city: a new university business school, a new performance venue and a revamp to the Grade II listed market hall. It’s another place benefiting from a Town Fund award under the Tories.

But even with fresh investment, she says shoplifting and assaults on shop workers have made the town feel unsafe. She spent Saturday visiting a local branch of the Co-op supermarket talking to staff, one of whom was attacked by a shoplifter.

“So many of them had worked all through Covid; their stores are a real part of the community and they were the only human contact for some people every week. When the staff feel unsafe, then it has such a huge impact,” she told The i Paper.

“It stays with you; it’s traumatic if you are assaulted, and then you’re going back to the same place every time to work. I’ve spoken to a number of people that I think, frankly, are courageous when they return, but often it’s the people that they work with as well that are there knowing that they’ve had a colleague who’s been hurt. I think everyone should be outraged that we haven’t been doing enough to stop that happening,” she added.

Other measures in the bill include tackling the spiking of drinks, drugs and knife offences. Off-road bikes roaring around estates and e-scooters on pavements will also be targeted, while signal jammers used to steal cars will be banned.

But Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp argues Cooper is building on work started under the last administration. The Tories published a retail action plan which included commitments for police to follow-up thefts and for officers to attend in person if store staff restrained the thief. That was alongside a business and police partnership programme.

“The vast majority of Labour’s new bill appears to constitute recycled ideas from the last government’s Criminal Justice Bill,” Philp told The i Paper. “This is, of course, welcome, but unfortunately, the Labour government’s funding settlement for police in the current financial year is £118m short, leading to the risk of 1,800 officers being cut. You can pass whatever law you like, but Labour is not properly funding police forces, meaning there won’t be enough police to implement these new laws.”

Taking back Britain’s streets needs a strong partnership between retailers and the police, with government removing the barriers to successful prosecution. Cooper is seeking to recruit 13,000 additional neighbourhood police by 2029.

Iceland supermarket boss Richard Walker has demanded a change to the law to allow images of violent shoplifters to be shared on local WhatsApp groups. Ministers are sympathetic to his call and are ironing out whether they need to work around any data protection rules which stop shopkeepers putting up posters of shoplifters in their stores to name and shame prolific thieves.

“Imagine going on your first date and finding your photo up in a shop. It’s about shaming people,” a government source said.

Cooper has been a keen student of home affairs for 14 years both as Shadow Home Secretary, Chair of the Home Office Select Committee and now in government. She is throwing the weight of years of planning at this enormous crime bill which contains over fifty new measures.

Labour knows it needs to be effective quickly in a country sick and tired of low-level crime. If this bill works, she will have made a significant contribution to the party’s next general election campaign.

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