Last month’s SGF Crime Seminar once again highlighted how retail crime is at epidemic levels yet there seems to be very little in the way of action to tackle this societal scourge.
by Antony Begley
Retail crime is just something that every local retailer in Scotland has had to put up with for as long as any of them can remember but the first few minutes of last month’s SGF Crime Seminar really brought home what retail crime looks and feels like in the real world. The series of CCTV videos that kicked the event off showed some truly horrific scenes of abuse and armed violence that stunned the audience into silence.
But these scenes aren’t one-off events or rare, extreme cases. Acts of violence are taking place in stores all over Scotland on a more or less daily basis. And while retail crime in all its ugly guises has always been a fact of life for most retailers, it’s getting worse as the years go by. The SGF Scottish Crime Report 2024/25, shared for the first time at the seminar, makes that all too clear.
A staggering 99.5% of retailers say shoplifting is a daily occurrence. An even higher percentage (99.8%) say shoplifting has increased in the last year. A similar 99.6% say violence against staff happens at least once a month. A terrifying 79.8% of respondents say incidents involving weapons like knives, clubs or even firearms occur at least once a month. Some 83.5% say violence against staff has increased in the past year.
I could go on and on but the point being made here is clear. What is not nearly so clear is why so little gets done about it? When something equally horrific happens when, for example, someone enters another enclosed public space like a cinema or a school with a knife, it makes the front pages of every newspaper. Why is retail treated so differently? Why does nobody want to know? Has violence in stores become so normalised that nobody cares any longer?
Action time
These questions and more were addressed on the day by a series of presenters from Daniel Johnson MSP to Superintendent Gordon Fotheringham from Police Scotland – but it has to be said that the conclusion at the end of the day is that no-one really knows how to tackle it, and politicians show very little enthusiasm for even tackling it in the first place.
The event served to show in fine detail the enormous scale of the problem, but there was very little output in terms of finding a solution.
Government budget cuts, police under-funding, societal breakdown post-Covid, the cost-of-living crisis. There are lots of explanations for why the situation is getting worse but very little in the way of practical, real solutions for finding a way out of this unsustainable situation.
Even the odd light at the end of the tunnel tends to end up in frustration and bitterness. Daniel Johnson MSP himself expressed disappointment and sadness that his Protection of Workers Bill has proven so ineffective in the real world. Only around 16,000 cases have been dealt with under the Act since it was introduced in August 2021 – a tiny drop in a massive ocean of crime – and Johnson accepted that, while he had hoped it would be “a game changer,” all the Act had really achieved was “to help us get better data on the scale of retail crime” without actually tackling it.
There was much hand-wringing and frustration from every speaker, but the reality remains that there is no pathway forward out of this mess. Johnson cited a lack of engagement from his political colleagues and a backlogged and inefficient court system while Police Scotland cited a lack of funding which leaves them with one hand tied behind their backs.
All of which is undoubtedly true, but where does that leave retailers and their staff? Are we really expecting them to go to work every day knowing that they will be abused or stolen from? What effect is this having on their mental health? How do we expect to recruit new staff into the sector when we can’t guarantee their safety?
And that’s before the financial cost of crime. The Crime Report finds that the average cost of retail crime per store is £19,673 a year – which is well over £100m across Scotland.
At the seminar, retail specialist Scott Annan suggested, perhaps half-jokingly, that retailers should take a leaf out of the French disgruntled worker’s playbook and organise a campaign of civil disobedience. It was presumably meant as a light-hearted suggestion, but it makes a serious point: how else can we expect the politicians to take notice unless we make them take notice. We should all close our stores for one day and, if no notice is taken, we do it again and again until it does get noticed.
Or, as Musselburgh Spar retailer Dan Brown put it: “How many retailers are going to have to die before the government does something?”
It’s a good question – and let’s hope he’s not asking it again at next year’s seminar.
