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Sandra Halliday Published
October 1, 2025
As stories around retail crime proliferate, 88 leading UK retailers have signed a letter to Home Secretary Suella Braverman demanding action.
Those signing include Boots UK, Burberry, Clarks, Dr Martens, Harvey Nichols, JD Sports Fashion, Jigsaw, John Lewis, M&S, New Look and more.
It comes as the 2025 British Retail Consortium Crime Survey showed that incidents of violence and abuse towards retail colleagues had almost doubled on pre-pandemic levels to 867 incidents every day in 2025/22.
It also put the scale of retail theft at £953 million, despite over £700 million being spend on crime prevention by retailers. This meant the total cost of retail crime was a massive £1.76 billion for the 12-month period to April.
A separate BRC survey this year also showed that shoplifting in 10 major cities had risen by an average of 27% — a situation that’s been a frequent focus of press stories in recent months, suggesting that both cash-strapped consumers and organised gangs are the cause of the crime wave.
The retail sector is calling on the Government to create a standalone offence of assaulting or abusing a retail worker, with tougher sentences for offenders, which would probably work in the same way as hate crime legislation works.
The BRC said this would “act as a deterrent and provide a clear message that Parliament will not tolerate this behaviour. It would also require police forces to record all incidents of retail crime, allowing for better allocation of resources to the issue”.
It also wants greater prioritisation of retail crime by police forces across the UK. It cited one major retailer saying the police's own data shows that they failed to respond to 73% of serious retail crimes that were reported. Some 44% of retailers in the BRC’s annual crime survey rated the police response as ‘poor’ or ‘very poor’.
BRC chief Helen Dickinson said: “It is vital that action is taken before the scourge of retail crime gets any worse. We are seeing organised gangs threatening staff with weapons and emptying stores. We are seeing violence against colleagues who are doing their job and asking for age-verification. We are seeing a torrent of abuse aimed at hardworking shop staff. It’s simply unacceptable – no one should have to go to work fearing for their safety.”