Respect for Shopworkers Week

Retail crime is soaring, with increasing numbers of shopworkers facing appalling violence and abuse as part of the process.

This ‘Respect for Shopworkers Week’ I have written with a number of Labour parliamentary candidates to the Home Secretary calling for greater action to tackle the retail crime blighting our high streets.

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Dear Home Secretary,

Retail crime is a scourge on our high streets which has a profound cost not just on retailers but the shopworkers who are too often forced to endure this criminality.

In recent months, reports from across the retail sector demonstrate the extent to which this crisis is escalating, with soaring rates of retail crime including shoplifting and the violence, threats and abuse directed towards retail staff.

Across the first six months of this year alone, for instance, Co-op reported 175,000 recorded incidents, representing around 1,000 incidents a day and an increase of 35% on the previous year.

Throughout the country criminals have been given the freedom to loot, with organised crime gangs often stealing to order and persistently repeating these offences in the same shops. What’s more, these criminal acts often act as flashpoints for anti-social behaviour against retail staff who are subject to appalling levels of violence, threats and abuse as they go about their jobs.

This behaviour is unacceptable, and alongside the co-operative retail sector, the Co-operative Party and the shopworkers’ union USDAW have long campaigned for more to be done to address this crisis.

Important steps have been taken, including the recently launched Retail Crime Action Plan which rightly seeks to ensure a police commitment to prioritise this issue. The actions already taken by retailers themselves to tackle retail crime are commendable and must be supported, including the retail sector’s approach under Project Pegasus.

But whilst we recognise and welcome the important steps that have been taken by retailers to address this epidemic of criminality, we urge the Government to go further in supporting their efforts.

Immediate steps towards this have been outlined by the Shadow Home Secretary, critically including a new and specific offence of assault against retail workers, and ensuring all shoplifting crimes are investigated by the police by scrapping the current £200 rule on theft of goods.

Given the scale of the crisis facing our retailers, high streets and shopworkers in the face of this soaring criminality, we urge you to seize the opportunity and follow the blueprint outlined by the Labour Party in supporting retailers and cracking down on retail crime.

Yours,

Peter Lamb
Labour candidate for Crawley