Shoplifting has risen by 20 per cent to hit another record, the latest official figures showed today.
Police recorded 530,643 offences in England and Wales in the year to March 2025 – the highest figure since records begun and up from 444,022 in the previous year.
Shoplifting has become an increasing nightmare for High Street shops, with only a tiny minority of offenders ever charged.
The crisis is illustrated by sickening CCTV revealing thieves casually walking out of stores with armfuls of high-value goods.
Footage from a Waitrose store in London‘s Notting Hill earlier this month showed two men leaving with a stash of steak and salmon while staff watched on – forbidden from doing anything due to company policy.
But elsewhere, shops have been fighting back, with two brave security guards seen grappling with a shoplifter trying to steal bottles of fizzy drink from a Greggs in nearby Hammersmith.
Footage filmed by MailOnline showed a young man being forced to drop the items on the floor before leaving in a strop.
Today’s crime figures – from the Office of National Statistics – also estimated that one in 10 people aged 16 and over in England and Wales were victims of at least one of the crime types of domestic abuse, sexual assault or stalking in the year to March.
Waitrose security officers and store workers watched on helplessly as their shelves were raided earlier this month
One onlooker who witnessed this month’s raid on the Notting Hill Waitrose described how the shoplifters had ‘absolutely zero panic on their faces’ as they strolled out with the stolen food.
Jack Barham recalled: ‘They just walked in and walked out. Everyone just stood there.
‘I asked the manager on duty what he could do about it, and he said they can not intervene or touch them, in case of a knife, which makes sense.
‘But the absurd thing he told me was that the security guards outside can’t do anything either.
‘What’s the point in them? They are essentially window dressing. This for me was the most shocking thing.’
A Waitrose spokesperson said: ‘Safety is our top priority, and our trained Partners and guards make appropriate interventions when safe to do so.’
Since the pandemic, the Russia Ukraine conflict and soaring inflation, theft has soared in the UK, recently hitting the highest level ever seen.
While some shoplifting may be fuelled by cost of living pressures, police believe organised gangs targeting expensive goods like steak, wine and high-end electronics are largely to blame.
Fightback: Security guards eject a thief from a Greggs in Hammersmith, West London
Coke bottles went flying as the man resisted security guards as they tried to evict him from the premises
Last year, a national police unit set up to tackle the scourge of shoplifting across Britain identified more than 20 gangs and 200 criminals driving the epidemic.
The gangs, many believed to be East European, are responsible for millions of pounds of thefts each year, and are also suspected of human trafficking and exploiting vulnerable individuals.
Today’s ONS release suggested that overall crime – as recorded by the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW), which quizzes individuals on their experience of crime – had risen by 7 per cent overall, driven by a 31 per cent increase in fraud.
Crime against individuals and households has generally decreased over the last decade with some notable exceptions, such as sexual assault.
Types of police-recorded crime that have fallen year-on-year falls include homicide (6 per cent), knife and sharp instrument offences (1%), firearms (21%) and robbery (3%).
Theft offences recorded by the CSEW are up by 4% year-on-year and – like shoplifting – are now at their highest level since current police recording practices began in 2003. The ONS says last year’s rise in theft was ‘not statistically significant’.
The ONS used data from the CSEW to estimate the prevalence of domestic abuse, sexual assault or stalking.
It believes one in eight for women have fallen victim to these offences, while for men it is slightly lower at about one in 12. It is the first time an estimate has been made of the combined prevalence of domestic abuse, sexual assault and stalking.
A masked thief – dressed all in black – loading stolen vapes in to a large bag in a Tesco store
The survey measures experiences of crime, with domestic abuse, sexual assault and stalking referred to as ‘crime types’ because in some cases a criminal offence may not have occurred.
Some 10.6% of all people aged 16 and over are likely to have experienced one or more of these crime types in the year to March 2025, with 12.8% for women and 8.4% for men.
The figures equate to an estimated 5.1 million people aged 16 and over in England and Wales, of which 3.2 million are women and nearly 2.0 million are men, the ONS said.
A slightly higher estimate of 5.4 million people or 11.3% has been made for the previous 12 months – the year to March 2024 – which equates to 3.4 million women (14.0%) and 2.0 million men (8.6%).
The ONS said that because these estimates are still in development and are subject to change, caution should be taken when making comparisons between the two years and is it not possible to say whether the difference is statistically significant.
The ONS’s new combined estimate of the prevalence of domestic abuse, sexual assault and stalking in England and Wales will be used as the main measure for monitoring the Government’s ambition to halve violence against women and girls (VAWG) in a decade.
The Home Office will provide more detail on the use of the new estimate, together with other ways to measure progress against the target, in a new cross-government VAWG strategy to be published later this year.
