Police record almost half a million shoplifting offences in England and Wales

Nearly half a million shoplifting offences were recorded by police in England and Wales in a year, the highest 12-month total on record, figures show.

A total of 492,914 offences were logged by forces in the year to September 2024, up 23% from 402,220 in the previous 12 months.

The figure is the highest since current records began in the year to March 2003, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Shoplifting levels had already reached a 20-year high last year, with the latest figures showing the crime continues to be on the rise.

Police recorded 1.8 million theft offences in the year to September, a 2% increase driven by shoplifting and a 22% rise in crimes involving theft from a person (146,109), according to the data published on Thursday.

Of the 473,342 police-recorded shoplifting offences in England and Wales in the year to September that have so far been assigned an outcome, 19% (88,165) resulted in a charge or summons, up from 16% in the previous 12 months, while 57% (269,237) of investigations were closed with no suspect identified, unchanged on the previous year, PA news agency analysis of Home Office figures shows.

It comes amid warnings that shoplifting is “spiralling out of control” after a survey by the British Retail Consortium (BRC) suggested there were more than 2,000 incidents a day, with staff facing assault, being threatened with weapons, and racial and sexual abuse.

Major retailers have been raising concerns for months about the increased cost of theft while the Government has vowed to tackle low-level shoplifting and make assaulting a shop worker a specific criminal offence.

The move to create the separate offence follows a long-running campaign by business owners and Conservative backbencher Matt Vickers.

Retailers said they hope the measures set out in the King’s Speech to Parliament last year after Labour won the election will make it easier for police to investigate and prosecute criminals.

Policing minister Dame Diana Johnson said the figures “remain unacceptably high” and the crimes were “blighting town centres and high streets right across the country”.

“For far too long these crimes have been written off as ‘low-level’ and not treated with the urgency or seriousness they deserve”, she said as she insisted the Government was “determined to turn the page” with its plan to boost police numbers and give officers the powers they need to “crack down on the criminals who cause misery in our communities”.

According to the ONS figures, knife crime recorded by police in England and Wales stood at 55,008 offences in the year to September 2024, up 4% from 52,969 in the previous 12 months and just below the pre-pandemic level of 55,170 in the year to March 2020.

The number of offences involving possession of an article with a blade or point fell slightly to 27,945, down 1% year-on-year from 28,181, but higher than the pre-pandemic figure of 23,264 in 2019/20.

Knife-enabled homicides stood at 228, down 14% from 264 in the previous 12 months.

Overall, police recorded 6.66 million crimes in England and Wales in the 12 months to September, a very slight drop (down 0.4%) on the previous year’s total of 6.69 million.

This is up from 4.03 million a decade earlier in 2013/14, but reflects “changes in police activity and recording practices” as well as genuine changes in trends in crimes reported to and recorded by forces, and “should not be used to say that overall crime has increased”, the ONS said.

Home Office figures published at the same time show the proportion of investigations into crimes recorded by police in the latest period which were closed with no suspect identified stood at 39.8%, compared with 40.3% in the previous year.

The proportion of suspects being taken to court stood at 6.8%. In rape cases, this was 2.7%. These are both slight increases on the previous period (5.9% and 2.4% respectively) but still among the lowest levels recorded.

Meanwhile, figures from the separate ONS crime survey for England and Wales suggest people aged 16 and over experienced 9.49 million incidents of crime in the year to September, up from 8.47 million in the previous 12 months.

This rise is mainly because of a 19% increase in fraud, which accounts for 3.86 million incidents in the survey, the ONS said.

The overall total of 9.49 million is lower than the 11.22 million for 2016/17, when fraud and computer misuse were first included in these figures.

Experiences of crimes, as measured by the ONS survey, have been on a broad downwards trend since the mid-1990s.

The survey covers a range of personal and household victim-based crime, including theft, robbery, criminal damage, fraud, computer misuse and violence with or without injury, but does not include sexual offences, stalking, harassment and domestic abuse, which are presented separately.