Walk into almost any high street shop and you will see it: security tags on cheese, locked cabinets for washing powder, staff told not to intervene. This is what a country looks like when theft has been quietly decriminalised. Shoplifting offences in the West Midlands jumped 30% in a year, from 24,295 to 31,620 recorded offences. Retailers detected 5.45 million incidents across the year, at a cost of around £400 million. This is not petty crime. It is organised, brazen, and increasingly violent.
The People on the Front Line Are Paying for It
Every single day, around 1,600 retail workers face abuse or assault. Of those, 118 cases a day involve physical violence and 36 involve a weapon. Think about that: shop workers - often young, often on minimum wage - are being threatened and attacked every day simply for doing their jobs. They did not sign up to be the last line of defence in a country that stopped taking theft seriously.
Why It Got This Bad
For years, the message from the system was that low-value theft was not worth a police officer's time. The infamous £200 threshold that made theft of goods worth less than that a summary-only offence sent a signal to every would-be thief: fill your bag, stay under the limit, and nothing will happen. Criminals are not stupid. They heard the message loud and clear, and they acted on it. When you stop enforcing the law, you do not get less crime - you get more confident criminals.
A New Law Is Welcome - But Laws Don't Make Arrests
The Crime and Policing Act 2026 scraps that £200 threshold and makes attacking a shop worker a standalone offence carrying up to six months in jail or an unlimited fine. Good. I welcome it. But I have seen too many tough-sounding laws passed and then never enforced. A law on paper deters no one if there is no officer to answer the call and no consequence at the end of it. The City of London has shown what works - real-time CCTV, data-led patrols, and a third of offences ending in arrest, charge or conviction. That is a model, not a miracle.
What Reform UK Would Do
Reform UK would put visible, proactive policing back on the high street and make every theft an offence worth investigating - no minimum threshold, no looking the other way. We would back shop workers with the full protection of the law and ensure those who assault them face real custodial consequences. Zero tolerance is not a slogan, it is a promise: if you steal or you attack a worker, you will be caught, charged and punished. Britain's shopkeepers and their staff deserve nothing less.