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Sandra Halliday Published
April 10, 2025
In a surprise move, the UK government has made a U-turn and announced moves to deter the increasing number of attacks on shop workers. It has also committed more funding to tackle the explosion in shoplifting post-pandemic.
The beefed up attempt to cut down on shop worker attacks includes tougher punishments for serial or abusive shoplifters and a new criminal offence of assaulting a retail worker, a crime that could mean a prison sentence and unlimited fines.
As for the funding, covering England and Wales, the government is investing £55 million over four years into expanding live facial recognition systems, which will include vehicles that can scan busy high streets.
There’s already a project, known as Pegasus, under which retail giants like M&S, Boots and Primark can use facial recognition tech and run their CCTV images through police databases.
But while campaign groups like Big Brother Watch called the facial recognition investment “an abysmal waste of public money”, the British Retail Consortium supported the move to upgrade the offence of assaulting shop workers.
It has campaigned for over five years, along with retailers, other trade associations and unions, to create a standalone offence, for more transparency about the scale of the issue and to help police to allocate resources to deal with it.
Helen Dickinson, BRC Chief Executive, said: “The voices of the three million people working in retail have finally been heard.
“The impact of retail violence has steadily worsened, with racial abuse, sexual harassment, threatening behaviour, physical assault and threats with weapons, often linked to organised crime. [Our] Annual Crime Survey showed record levels of violence and abuse, with incidents soaring to over 1,300 per day last year, compared to 870 the year before.
“Victims are ordinary hardworking people -- teenagers taking on their first job, carers looking for part-time work, parents working around childcare.
“This announcement sends a clear message that this behaviour will not be tolerated. It will improve the police response, which has historically been poor, as police will now have the necessary data to understand the scale of the problem and allocate sufficient resource to address this issue.
“Retailers are playing their part, spending over £1bn last year on crime prevention measures. Government has taken action, and it is vital that the police use this new legislation to step up their response to incidents.”