Britain’s £2 billion shoplifting spree sparks security overhaul

The explosive rise of shoplifting in the UK is reshaping the retail security sector as personnel numbers grow and stores turn to new — sometimes controversial — technology.

Almost £2 billion ($2.5 billion) of stock was stolen between September 2022 and August 2023, according to the British Retail Consortium’s latest crime survey — the most on record and nearly twice as much as in the preceding 12 months. The number of violent or abusive shoplifting incidents also rose to more than 1,300 a day, up from 870 a year earlier, the BRC said.

The wave of retail crime is not just a British problem: Post-pandemic price rises have also driven demand for discounted and often stolen goods in the US and parts of Europe and Asia. But the effects of runaway inflation in the UK were compounded by a light-touch approach to tackling low.

Britain’s retailers, who have traditionally had few effective ways to tackle shoplifting, believe they will be able to turn the tables in 2025.

Spending millions

Richard Walker, chief executive officer of frozen food retailer Iceland, told Bloomberg News that the company plans to become the first major UK supermarket to run a trial of facial recognition technology next year. While civil rights campaigners say the tech poses a threat to privacy and personal freedoms, Walker sees it as a useful tool for tracking serial shoplifters.

“We’ve never spent more on in-store security,” he said. “It’s millions.”

Other grocers including Tesco Plc, the country’s biggest, are pouring millions of pounds into equipping staff with body cameras and other tools. The industry spent about £1.2 billion on crime prevention measures last year, up from £720 million in 2022, the BRC has found.

While some steal to survive, organized shoplifting gangs have become more common in recent years, swiping items in bulk to resell at a discount. Retailers and police are working to share more information and CCTV images of the most prolific offenders in a partnership known as Project Pegasus. One large supermarket has identified a woman who was responsible for a shoplifting spree across 80 stores, from Exmouth to Durham, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Private security plays a role in the project too. Mitie Plc, which supplies surveillance and guards to retail businesses, is sharing intelligence with police to catch prolific offenders.

“We don’t want police spending weeks and months doing work that we could have already done,” said John Unsworth, Mitie’s director of crime and intelligence. Information supplied by the facilities management company led to the jailing of a gang in 2022 that had stolen about £50,000 of goods from Co-op and Spar shops in northwest England, according to police.

Identifying key offenders will be critical as UK law changes to reclassify thefts of less than £200 as crimes and to make assault of a shop worker a standalone offense, punishable by six months in jail. Since the launch of a specialist national policing unit in May, 93 gang members responsible for more than £4 million in losses have been arrested.

Organized shoplifting “does a huge amount of harm, in terms of not only the volume but the cost to the public, because clearly the prices go up,” said Chief Constable Amanda Blakeman, who heads the unit.

Growing Hostility

Security staff remain an important line of defense for retailers. The overall number of security licenses rose to 497,000, up 2% compared to a year earlier, according the Security Industry Authority, which regulates the sector.

The Co-op Group, which runs about 2,400 stores in the UK, has increased its budget for security personnel by about 50% in the last two years, said Paul Gerrard, the group’s director of campaigns.

Guards are expected to act as a visual deterrent to would-be thieves and to gather information that can be shared with police and other retailers. Like all members of the public, they can perform a citizen’s arrest, but they have no additional legal right to detain a suspect. Most retailers tell staff to avoid engaging with potentially dangerous criminals for their own safety and that of their customers.

“We’ll never ask colleagues to physically intervene,” said Gerrard. A Co-op employee lost the sight in an eye after an assault, he said, while others broke bones.

While licensed UK security guards are trained to intervene physically, much of their instruction is focused on verbal tactics.

One security guard at home-improvement chain B&Q said that politely saying hello to potential shoplifters meant he could signal that he was watching without making accusations. The 23-year-old guard, who didn’t want to be named as he works undercover, said his best catch was preventing a theft of £730 worth of screwdrivers, hammers and other hand tools earlier this year.

But shoplifters’ growing hostility is making retail jobs more challenging.

One sales assistant at Pepco Group’s Poundland, a discount store chain, described being taunted by thieves because they were confident police wouldn’t arrive in time to arrest them. The 60-year-old, who didn’t want to be named as he feared reprisal from his employer, said he had also been assaulted by shoplifters who smashed his glasses and left him winded.

Iceland’s Walker says the government should consider giving more powers to security guards.

“You go to Spain and they’ll have handcuffs and pepper spray,” he said. “It’s a bit of a losing battle if, in this country, in-store security guards have as much power as a civilian.”

Police response times have improved since the launch of the previous Conservative government’s Retail Action Plan last October, which offers guidance on how to respond to shoplifting. Officers attended 66% of callouts to Co-op stores where a suspected thief had been detained in the year to October, according to the chain’s security provider Mitie. That’s up from 22% of incidents between January and September 2023.

The Co-op’s Gerrard says rehabilitating repeat offenders, rather than handing them ineffective short sentences, should be a goal. But for the time being, “investment by businesses, both in cash and in time with the police, produces positive results.”