High-street retailers are demanding more action to tackle the shoplifting epidemic in Britain, after more than 100 young people stormed a Marks & Spencer store in south London last week.
Shoplifters have become “more brazen, more organised and more aggressive”, said M&S retail director Thinus Keeve in The Telegraph. He called on London Mayor Sadiq Khan and Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood to do more to address the problem, including providing “greater transparency” about its “true scale and impact”.
Shoplifting in England and Wales cost retailers £400 million last year, according to the British Retail Consortium. Iceland’s executive chair, Richard Walker, has likened it to a “daily low level war”, and has called for supermarket staff to be given extra powers to deal with the most violent offenders – like in Spain, where “all the security guards have truncheons and pepper spray” and “don’t mess about”.
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What did the commentators say?
“This is not just any intervention, this is a Marks & Spencer intervention,” said The Times’ editorial board. It is an “alarm bell from one of Britain’s most trusted and storied brands; its concerns are a cri de coeur from middle England”.
M&S have “articulated what small retailers, and what the voiceless and powerless ordinary people of this country” have been seeing in recent years, said Patrick West in The Spectator. Last week’s “scenes of mayhem” in Clapham are “distressingly familiar to the inhabitants of the towns and cities”, who are witnessing the “seemingly inexorable collapse in civic society and the breakdown of our formerly high-trust society”.
“This weakness percolates back to policing,” said former Met Police detective Dominic Adler in UnHerd; if criminals “know they’re unlikely to ever face imprisonment, they see little incentive to stop offending”, and, equally, overworked police officers “see little reason to arrest, either”. This government’s updates to the 2020 Sentencing Act abolished custodial sentences for a variety of petty offences, including most shoplifting, and “punches the bruise of the ‘broken Britain’ narrative”.
This is not “a matter for the retailers to solve on their own, as some have suggested”, said The Telegraph’s editorial board. “If criminals think they can get away with theft or even violence,” it will only get worse. “The police need the resources and the support to crack down.”
What next?
The government has made some “welcome efforts” to help retailers in its recent Crime and Policing Bill, said The Times. Chief among these is abolishing the “misguided” £200 threshold that made “low-value shoplifting” a lesser offence, “a measure that was designed to ease the burden on police, but that gave encouragement to opportunistic raiders”. But “there is clearly a need for more to be done”.
There is a surprising generational divide when it comes to people’s views on shoplifting. While 74% of all Britons consider it a fairly or very serious crime, this drops to 35% among 18 to 24-year-olds, according to a recent YouGov poll. Significant numbers of younger people polled say they think shoplifting is justifiable, given current cost-of-living challenges.