The Co-op is the UK’s fifth largest food retailer, with 2,400 stores. Every day in 2023 around 1,000 criminal incidents are recorded across its estate, up 44 per cent in 12 months, including three or four physical assaults on colleagues.
It is not surprising that that Co-op claims the UK is experiencing a retail crime epidemic where criminals have ‘freedom to loot’.
But this criminal explosion is largely being ignored by the police. Indeed, police forces fail to respond to around 71 per cent of all retail crimes. For example, one Co-op branch in Liverpool suffered 1,000 incidents in a year – but received just one visit from the police. Some stores report that it is the same individuals who are responsible for the majority of incidents.
This led the Co-op to launch a campaign to both raise awareness of this issue – which puts many retail workers at risk – and improve response rates.
There were risks attached to such an approach. The Co-op was the first retailer to speak out publicly about retail crime, which, it was aware, could alienate both the police and Government.
Its three-pronged approach kicked off in July 2023 with a report that revealed the Co-op had suffered 336,270 incidents of theft, abuse and attacks on its staff over the previous year. It also claimed that its security guards were forced to release two in every five offenders they managed to detain because the police had failed to show up.
The report generated extensive media coverage, including interviews with Co-op spokespeople on Good Morning Britain, BBC Breakfast, BBC Radio 5 Live, BBC Radio 4 Today programme and lunchtime and evening news bulletins.
Print media followed, including an interview with Co-op Food’s chief executive Matt Hood in the Daily Telegraph, in which he explained that the rampant looting was not due to the cost-of-living crisis, as some had claimed, but to organised crime. For example, there was evidence that baby formula was being stolen to cut drugs. To date, the Co-op’s campaign has generated more than 4,500 articles.
Hood also called on MPs to support an amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill, then going through Parliament, which would make attacks on shop workers a crime, thereby forcing police to attend all incidents.
The campaign forced an immediate response, with chief constables pledging more resources to tackle shoplifting. And in October 2023, the Retail Crime Action Plan was announced. It offered clear guidance on how retailers should submit CCTV evidence, while also promising to prioritise police attendance at incidents where violence had occurred, where serial offenders had been detained or where evidence needed to be promptly secured.
The second phase, which launched in November 2023, used Respect for Shopworkers Week as a hook to call on the police, crime commissioners and the policing minister to make changes.
And in February 2024, the Co-op published a report Stealing with Impunity, written by Dr Emmeline Taylor, professor of criminology at City, University of London, that set out a ten-point plan to turn the tide on prolific offenders and retail crime.
These included a commitment from police and crime commissioners to develop a strategy to tackle retail crime, a campaign to target the stolen goods market, presumption against custodial sentences of less than six months, and the introduction of a standalone offence for the Protection of Retail Workers.
The Co-op also called for MPs to back an amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill to make it a standalone offence to abuse a shop worker, while providing templates for 50,000 employees and five million members to send letters to local MPs.
Two months after its report’s publication, the Government announced plans to make assaulting a retail worker a standalone criminal offence, with prison sentences of up to six months, unlimited fines and bans on the perpetrator returning to the shop in which they committed their crimes. Breaching such an order is now a criminal offence carrying a five-year maximum sentence.
