A last word on retail crime statistics.
I have to admit I got bored again. And it's about time I got off this hobby-horse and started on another one, so I wanted a final look at claims from the British Retail Consortium (and the Co-Op) on the state of retail crime. I'm not (just) trying to prove a point here, but to challenge the way statistics are being used to shape potential government policy. Something-must-be-done-ism is always a terrible way to create policy. The law of unintended consequence is the strongest in the universe.
Co-Op retail and the BRC continue to be pushing an agenda based around rising levels of retail crime and violence. It's been summarised in a couple of pieces from the BRC. One claims that retail crime has risen by 27% in major cities across the country. The other is based on the 2023 retail crime study from the BRC and makes various claims which we shall look at below. Behind both is a series of points:
So let's have a look using the BRC's own figures and some other reputable statistics. I can't go and have a look at the '27% rise in major cities' figures because...I'm not sure they exist. Though they've been quoted ad nauseam and many better people than I have asked for the research, the BRC has refused to part with it. So far, so typical.
But we CAN look at the BRC's crime survey. It's here. Somewhat unhelpfully the 2023 crime survey driving these campaigns actually covers the financial year 2021-2022 and years prior. So claims that these stats show a recent 'surge' are over-stated to say the least.
Let's have a look at some of the BRC/Co-op claims. Helen Dickinson of the BRC says
Every time I speak with retailers, crime is getting worse. Thieves are becoming bolder, and more aggressive. Violence and abusive behaviour are on the rise
But do the BRC figures show that? Well...up to a point Lord Copper, but only when stated EXACTLY like that. Here are the figures on raw incidents (note, the BRC report will switch without hesitation between 'incidents per 1000', 'total incidents', 'value of incidents' in its text, suggesting the one most useful to an argument is ALWAYS being used)...
What do we see? The top line is the most serious offences (one would assume)---violence with injury. And it shows that in 2021-22, incidents were well below the level in 2016-17. and roughly where they were the year before that. What we could say is that the range 2.5 to 3.5 feels about 'normal', and we'll have to wait a few years to see whether there's any real trend. But wait, are the statistics on violence in a shop worse than just, I don't know, those from walking down the street? Well, again, not really. The usual evidence (P.5) seems to be that violence against individual people runs at about 2.4 per 1000 in England and Wales--so unless we do see a trend, there's not a major difference between retail life and normal life (yes, caveats that much of the street violence is alcohol fuelled, but the point's interesting).
Again, on the second line, violence WITHOUT injury (presumably smashing something up in the shop) is well down on a decade before. But what HAS increased is abusive behaviour. Albeit, even that is down from the second covid year.
This absence of serious violence is reinforced in the second table on the same page. This looks at the use of weapons. Again, this is probably covering too few years to determine a trend and might only show that crime during the covid years was more serious, but it certainly doesn't imply that things are getting MORE violent.
So Ms Dickinson's claim that 'violence and abusive behaviour are on the rise' (sic) is only correct if you either take a very short timespan or (if you compare 2021/22 to 2019/20 as the prev-covid year) if they are always lumped together--almost the entire 'rise' comes because of an increase in abuse, not violence.
Now, in any conversations about 'retail crime' issues around shop theft, violence and abusive behaviour are conflated. As we've seen, ONE of these appears to definitely be on the rise (as it is across the service and leisure sectors), and one is pretty static. What about shop theft? According to the outgoing Chair of John Lewis, we are seeing an 'epidemic' of shoplifting.
Shop thefts have more than doubled in the past three years, costing retailers ￡953m a year, according to the British Retail Consortium
Again let's look at the BRC's own figures. Apologies for the scrawl on top, but they didn't bother including the years to which the columns referred (which might, or might not, increase your faith in the stats...)
So the quote above ('shop thefts have doubled...￡953m a year') combines the top lines of each of the tables. So following this, thefts doubled in terms of numbers, but only increased by about 25% in terms of costs...customer theft is what we're talking about here. Now, I can't refute either of those, though I would note that the impact of inflation on the value of losses over those three years would be about...25% or so. But I do want you to take a look at those stats generally. They don't fill me with confidence. According to these stats:
领英推荐
Even the BRC itself is confused by its stats. In its 2021 report, it appears bewildered by the figures around 'other' losses and employee theft.
The rise in employee theft year on year – with dramatic rises in 2018-19 and again in 2019-20 is difficult to explain, though the small percentage number of incidents suggests that there may be some higher value cases compared with customer theft. The increase in theft by others may reflect a rise in the use of agency workers
Now, I'm not saying these stats are garbage, but...they don't inspire any confidence at all. They're driven by what is reported and what the aims of the BRC are at any particular time--that massive rise in employee theft is barely mentioned in the surveys, when you'd think it would be a major area of concern.
But let's look at some more objective stats on shop lifting from the Office of National Statistics. These are for Police reports, so the BRC might claim it doesn't give the full picture. And that might be true, but we can at least get an idea of trend from it. And...there isn't one, to be honest.
We are roughly where we were in 2013-2015 and behind where we got to in 2017-19. Which doesn't really fit at all with the BRC stats. Make of that what you will...
Then one of the other claims is that retailers fail to report issues to the Police because of a perception that they won't take action. That, at least, is the headline quote...
Greater prioritisation of retail crime by police forces across the UK.?For one major retailer, the police's own data shows that they failed to respond to 73% of serious retail crimes that were reported. 44% of retailers in the BRC’s annual crime survey rated the police response as ‘poor’ or ‘very poor’.
The problem is that the survey does, yes, show that 44% of respondents think the Police are doing a poor or very poor job. But 56% think they're doing a fair or good job. Which is...the highest figure for years--since 2013-14 in fact.
Now, the BRC does claim that "A considerable number of retailers, particularly larger retailers, continued to rate the response as poor or very poor so that weighted for the number of employees 55% continued to rate the response negatively. For many a negative assessment was accompanied by a view that there was no point in reporting violence and abuse due to a lack of response from the police."
Which is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you don't report, the Police can't take action, so it looks like they're not acting, which means they get a kicking from...the very companies who aren't reporting. I'm not going to name names here, but we're very aware of some major retailers that have simply stopped reporting, either because they have no faith in the Police, or because they no longer have systems in place--because they have reduced local shop security staff by so much and are attempting to rely on technology such as cctv and regionally- or nationally-based monitoring teams.
And what's this, hidden amongst all that maze of figures in the BRC report? They also include the figures for spend on security. You might remember the Co-Op claimed that retail crime was costing them a huge amount in new security measures. Well, if that its so, it's not something being shared by every retailer...
For there, on the back pages, at the very end (okay, before the bit on cyber-security), at the very end of the very end are the stats on retailer spend on security. And they don't paint a happy picture, or one very flattering to those retailers claiming they're spending SO MUCH MONEY on protecting their staff. They're not.
Look at the final two columns. Obviously there was a massive reduction in spend on security in the main covid year (perhaps leading to the claimed massive increase in incidents!?), but in 2021-22 it was not reversed AT ALL. A 1% increase in spend on security year-on-year means that spend on crime reduction in 2021-22 was still at just 60% of what it was in 2018-2019. And when you take out the spend on cyber, it's not far off HALF of what it was pre-covid--49% DOWN on 2019-20.
And you can be sure that the BRC will say nothing that looks like criticism of the retailers involved...Its commentary returns to attacks on the Police.
So where are we? It appears pretty undeniable that anti-social behaviour and abuse has increased substantially since covid (though not just in retail of course). And that this has driven the rise in overall retail 'crime' figures. Shop theft might have been increasing alongside, but the national figures don't appear to show that. What we DO know, however, is that there might be a VERY good reason if it has been increasing, and that's down to an increasing reliance by retailers on remote monitoring and ways of saving money in terms of security. And not just in terms of security itself, but also in terms of reduction in front of house staff numbers. A subject I WILL return to in the near future.