Is Shoplifting No Longer Illegal?

If stealing from a shop were truly illegal in practice, offenders would be charged, retailers would have faith in the system, and the Police would allocate more resources to tackle it. Yet the data suggests otherwise: those who wish to steal are rarely deterred. Fewer than 1 in 5 cases result in prosecution.  As Lord Foster of Bath rightly proposed, we should call it what it is, shop theft. 

Unsurprisingly, the lack of justice has fuelled a surge in thieving. In the 12 months to September 2024, incidents of theft reported by UK retailers rose by 3.7 million, reaching 20.4 million in total and costing retailers £2 billion. Recorded cases have hit a new high of 530,643 as of June 2025. This is not a minor issue of “petty theft”; it has grown into a nationwide problem where highly organised, repeated criminal behaviour goes unpunished. 

Retailers, disillusioned by the lack of response, are increasingly reluctant to report offences. The British Retail Consortium found that nine in ten retailers who suffered theft in 2023–24 did not report incidents, believing nothing would come of it. This growing despair has left many shops feeling exposed and unprotected by the law.

The link between visible Policing and crime prevention is well established, yet Police numbers continue to fall. As of 31 March 2025, there were 146,442 full-time equivalent officers across England and Wales, a decrease since the current government was elected.  London has experienced the steepest decline, losing 1,022 officers, a 3% fall from 34,315 to 33,293. Police presence has dwindled in precisely the crime hotspots where theft is surging.

The 2014 reclassification of thefts under £200 as summary-only offences, intended to speed up prosecutions, has had unintended consequences. The Police seem to have interpreted the change as a signal that shop theft is a lesser crime, and failed to identify that most theft isn’t opportunistic but is committed by organised criminal gangs attacking our retailers. 

It’s frightening to see today’s Metropolitan Police failing to deliver Sir Robert Peel’s first principle of Policing: ‘to prevent crime and disorder”.   

Local neighbourhoods like West End Lane aren’t being protected; theft has risen sharply, with little if any visible Police response. Shopkeepers describe feeling exposed, anxious, and abandoned. “The official numbers are just the tip of the iceberg,” said one. “Most of us don’t even bother reporting smaller thefts anymore. The response is worse than pathetic.”

Another retailer recounted locking a thief inside the store and calling the police: “When they arrived, they seemed more concerned for the thief’s wellbeing than ours.” These are not isolated experiences; they echo across the capital. 

Shoplifting in London has surged dramatically in recent years. Data from the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) shows that between 2022/23 and 2023/24, reported shoplifting offences rose by 48.7%. The frequency and value of shop-theft has never been higher.

Evidently, the Police are failing to both deter and catch shoplifters. The Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee’s 2024 inquiry concluded that “shop theft is seriously underreported and is not being tackled properly. There is a widespread perception that shop theft is not treated seriously by the police.”

More “Bobbies on the Beat” are needed, but so too are better training, data-driven deployment, and focused policing in high-crime hotspots. Hotspot policing works: when resources are concentrated where offences cluster, offending drops. Combined with the proposed retail-flag system, this would allow forces to track repeat offenders and respond more intelligently to retail crime. 

Reclassification, with the aim of speeding-up processing and to allow magistrates and police-led prosecutions to deal with the majority of shop-theft in 2014, where the items stolen were worth less than £200, has had two profound consequences: 1. the Police reduced the priority given to catching shoplifters, and 2. those employed to fight crime failed to take on the Gangs and Organised Criminal organisations who profit from co-ordinating mass retail theft.

The good news is that the Labour Government will now abolish the £200 threshold for shop theft. Additionally, the Home Secretary must ensure that the Police understand they are responsible for preventing shop theft. Without robust enforcement, offenders will continue to act with impunity. The government is responsible for ensuring that legal reform is supported by sufficient resourcing for our courts, increasing the number of Police officers on our streets, and first re-establishing trust between the Police and the Shopkeeper before progressing to collaborative initiatives capable of putting the criminals behind bars.

London, in particular, is descending into a trust deficit cycle, where those in power and the Police hide behind inaccurate crime statistics; Mayor Sir Khan complains: "We've seen a number of politicians here and across the globe talking down London and spreading misinformation about crime and safety in the capital.” Monday 29 September 2025 Sky News. But it’s actually Sir Khan who’s hastening the destruction of trust when he refers to recorded crime figures that are now woefully under-reporting the rate of crime in the Capital. Londoners are sadly under-reporting crime because they no longer believe the Police will catch those who commit crimes. London will only regain a sense of safety when those in power make the criminals, not the law-abiding citizens, frightened by how London is policed.