Yvette Cooper pledges crackdown on shoplifting ‘epidemic’ with new crime bill

Police recorded 443,995 shoplifting offences in the year leading up to March 2024, a significant increase from 326,440 in the same period a decade ago

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has pledged to tackle the rising 'epidemic' of shoplifting in the UK by giving police stronger powers through her proposed Crime and Policing Bill.

The Labour MP’s announcement follows a media report revealing that shoplifters are increasingly going unpunished, despite the number of recorded offences soaring to record levels.

An analysis of official figures by The Times showed that police recorded 443,995 shoplifting offences in the year leading up to March 2024, a significant increase from 326,440 in the same period a decade ago.

However, the number of shoplifters being punished has plummeted, with only 431 fixed penalty notices issued in the past year, a 98 per cent decrease from 2014.

Fixed penalty notice is the lowest form of punishment used for theft of goods valued at under £100.

Moreover, most police forces did not issue a single penalty for shoplifting last year.

More serious forms of punishment have also seen a sharp decline, with the report indicating a drop of 87 per cent in the use of cautions to punish shoplifters over the past decade, from 16,281 in 2014 to just 2,077 last year.

Convictions have also fallen dramatically, with only 28,955 shoplifters prosecuted in court last year, compared to 71,998 a decade ago.

The home secretary described shoplifting as "an epidemic in our society" and vowed to address what she called the "shameful neglect" of this issue by the police.

Cooper plans to introduce legislation that will grant police stronger powers to ban repeat shoplifters from town centres.

The proposed Crime and Policing Bill intends to scrap a 2014 rule that classified thefts of goods under £200 as a summary-only offence, which led to a sharp decline in all forms of punishment.

Cooper believes scrapping this rule will ensure shoplifting is taken more seriously.

In addition, Cooper announced plans to introduce a new law making assaults on shop workers a specific criminal offence.

She emphasised that their neighbourhood policing guarantee will put thousands more officers on the streets to crack down on “shop theft, antisocial behaviour and the other crimes that blight our communities and make people feel unsafe.”

While acknowledging that the problem cannot be solved overnight, Cooper assured to end the neglect that has allowed shoplifting to become an epidemic.

The Times report also noted that the true scale of shoplifting is likely far higher than official figures suggest, as many offences go unrecorded or unreported.

The report cited a British Retail Consortium survey, which found that its members recorded 16.7 million incidents of customer theft in the 2023-24 financial year, equivalent to 45,750 a day, costing £1.8 billion, or £5 million a day.