Shoplifting offences pass 500,000 a year for first time as retailers warn of ‘organised looting’

Shoplifting recorded by police in England and Wales has passed half a million offences in a year for the first time, official figures showed this week, with retailers saying the true number is closer to 20 million once unreported thefts are counted.

The Office for National Statistics said 516,000 shop thefts were logged in the 12 months to June, up 11% on the previous year and more than double the figure a decade ago. Fewer than 16% ended with a charge or summons. Just over half of recorded cases were closed with no suspect identified.

Retailers say the figures reflect a shift from opportunistic theft to organised, repeat offending. The British Retail Consortium estimates that losses from customer theft reached £2.6bn last year, and that shops spent a further £1.9bn on guards, cameras, body-worn video and locked cabinets. Violence and abuse against staff ran at more than 2,000 incidents a day.

“What we are describing is not a teenager slipping a lipstick into a pocket,” said Marcus Delaney, head of loss prevention at a national convenience chain with 1,400 stores. “It is a group of four walking in, filling bags with meat, coffee and razors in 90 seconds and walking out, knowing nobody will stop them. They come back the next day. My colleagues call it looting, and I do not think they are wrong.”

The Home Office pointed to the crime and policing act, which removed the £200 threshold below which shop theft was treated as a low-level summary offence and created a specific offence of assaulting a retail worker, carrying a maximum sentence of six months. The home secretary said this week that 2,100 of the 13,000 additional neighbourhood officers promised for this parliament were now in post, and that town centre patrols had been “prioritised in every force”.

Chief constables argue that the figures partly reflect better reporting. Several forces have struck agreements with large retailers under which store CCTV is shared directly with police, and a national scheme matching images against custody records has identified 4,800 prolific offenders since 2024. Deputy Chief Constable Alan Ferris, who leads on retail crime for the National Police Chiefs’ Council, said: “A rising number can be a sign that people have started to believe something will happen when they call us.”

On the high street in Stockton-on-Tees, where the Co-op has shut two stores in 18 months, shopkeepers were sceptical. Nasreen Iqbal, who has run a newsagent on the high street for 22 years, said she had stopped reporting thefts under £50. “It is an hour on the phone and a crime number,” she said. “I lock up the spirits and the baby milk now. I never thought I would be locking up baby milk.”

The ONS figures also showed overall theft rising for the third year, while violent crime and burglary continued a long-term fall.