Walk into almost any shop in the country and ask the staff what their job is like now. The answer is grim: abuse, threats and theft have become a daily fact of working life. The numbers are staggering — surveys point to around 1,600 incidents of violence and abuse against retail workers every single day, and roughly 5.5 million shoplifting offences in a single year. This is not petty crime. This is an epidemic that was allowed to grow while the law looked the other way.
How We Got Here
For years, low-value shoplifting was treated as barely worth the paperwork, thanks to a notorious £200 threshold that effectively told thieves they could help themselves and walk out. At the same time, neighbourhood policing was hollowed out, with officers pulled off the beat to plug gaps elsewhere. The result was as predictable as it was avoidable: criminals learned there were no consequences, and they acted accordingly.
The New Law: Welcome, But Not Enough
To be fair, the Crime and Policing Act 2026, which received Royal Assent in April, takes real steps. It abolishes the £200 shoplifting loophole and creates a standalone offence of assaulting a retail worker. Those are sensible measures Reform has long argued for, and they should have happened years ago. But a law on the statute book is worthless if no one is there to enforce it. You can criminalise an act all you like; if a shopkeeper rings the police and no one comes, nothing has changed.
That is the gap between Westminster’s press release and the reality on the shop floor. New offences do not patrol the streets. Officers do.
Soft Schemes Are No Substitute for Deterrence
Across the country we are also seeing a drift toward “recovery” and support schemes for repeat offenders — sending mentors to help persistent shoplifters rather than making theft genuinely consequential. Compassion has its place, but when violence and theft are this widespread, the first duty of the state is to protect the law-abiding worker behind the till. Deterrence is not cruelty. It is the basic bargain of a functioning society.
What Reform UK Would Do
Reform UK would put police back on the beat in our town centres, ensure every retail crime is actually attended and investigated, and make sure the new offences carry real consequences in practice, not just on paper. A shopworker should be able to do an honest day’s work without being threatened, and a thief should expect to be caught.
The law has finally caught up with common sense. Now the government has to find the will, and the officers, to make it mean something.