Home secretary Yvette Cooper has pledged to “end the shameful neglect” of shoplifting by the police as punishments have plummeted in recent years.
An analysis by The Times using official figures from the Home Office, Ministry of Justice, and police forces found that just 431 shoplifters received fixed penalty notices — the lightest punishment for stealing items worth less than £100, in the year to March 2024.
The figure marks a 98% drop from 19,419 issued a decade ago, as most police forces issued no penalties for shoplifting over the past year.
The use of cautions as a punishment for shoplifting has also dropped 87% from 16,281 in 2014 to 2,077.
Convictions also fell to 28,955 over the past year, compared to 71,998 10 years ago.
Retail crime has soared in recent years as the number of shoplifting offences recorded by police in England and Wales hit its highest figure in 20 years.
According to the Office for National Statistics, a total of 443,995 offences were reported by police in the year to March 2024, up 30% from the previous year’s figure.
Cooper told The Times that via the Crime and Policing Bill, she would “bring in stronger powers to ban repeat offenders from town centres” and scrap a rule rolled out 10 years ago, which meant that police treated stolen goods worth under £200 as a summary-only offence.
She added that the government will “make assaults on shop workers a specific criminal offence, and, through our neighbourhood policing guarantee, we will put thousands more police onto our streets to crack down on shop theft, antisocial behaviour and the other crimes that blight our communities and make people feel unsafe”.
“We cannot end this problem overnight. But we can end the shameful neglect of this problem that has allowed it to become an epidemic in our society.”
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