Shoplifting appears to be showing signs of falling after new figures revealed a small drop in the number of shopper thefts last year.
A survey by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) revealed that 26% of retail businesses experienced shopper theft last year, in comparison to a historic high of 28% in 2022, the BBC reported.
While a separate ONS report using police crime figures showed reports of shoplifting hit a 20-year record level last year, the Commercial Victimisation Survey (CVS) found a two percentage point drop in thefts.
This annual survey is considered a more reliable measure due to it surveying companies on their experiences of crime, while the police data is distorted by whether businesses report incidents.
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The CVS report revealed that more than three-quarters of grocery retailers had encountered theft from a shopper, while a further 43% said their workers had been assaulted or threatened.
Yet the report also revealed that 45% of companies which had been subjected to retail crime did not report it to police, implying that the true number of crimes could be higher than the police data show.
The latest figures follows a move by the government last month to make the assault of a shop worker a separate criminal offence in England and Wales, as part of a crackdown on the shoplifting “epidemic“.
