The cost of crime against convenience retailers has risen by 29% to £316m over the past year, according to the Association of Convenience Stores.
The ACS 2025 Crime Report, released today, said the cost of crime including theft, vandalism, robbery, burglary and fraud, was £6,259 per store.
Retailers recorded 6.2 million incidents of shop theft, up from 5.6 million the previous year.
Robbery has also seen a sharp rise across the sector, with the number of cases jumping 50.8% to 9,200. Almost 60% of retailers believed incidents involving organised crime had also increased.
However, violent acts against shopworkers dropped 22% to 59,000 incidents over the past year, while the rate of verbal abuse was unchanged at 1.2 million cases.
The sector also spent £265m on crime prevention and detection measures over the past year, with measures including the use of CCTV, body-worn cameras and Perspex screens at tills.
Amit Puntambekar, who runs a Nisa Local in Fenstanton, Cambridgeshire, said he was attacked and injured when he attempted to challenge a thief, and had been dealing with violent threats for months.
“When your staff are threatened with a hammer, when someone threatens to kill you who lives near your shop and the police don’t take it seriously, what’s the point?” he said.
Spar retailer Ian Lewis, based in Minster Lovell, Oxfordshire, said his store had been the target of two ramraid attacks in recent months. “My business was ramraided by criminals in a Land Rover and the cash machine ripped out,” he said. “My parents live above the shop. I will never forget the voicemail that I got from my parents when this happened.”
The ACS report comes as Parliament considers the Crime and Policing Bill at second reading stage today (10 March). The bill aims to introduce a separate offence for assaulting a shopworker, to scrap the £200 threshold for shop theft offences, and to increase police powers to deal with anti-social behaviour, among other measures to deal with prolific offenders more effectively.
The ACS has backed the Crime and Policing Bill as a long-overdue turning point in fighting retail crime, and is urging police to make tackling the problem a priority this year.
ACS CEO James Lowman said: “The levels of theft, abuse and violence experienced by retailers over the past year makes for shocking reading, but it will not surprise our members who are living it on a daily basis.
“Criminals targeting local shops without fear of reproach cannot be allowed to continue, which is why we’re fully supportive of the government’s Crime and Policing Bill.
“In our Crime Report, we have set out ways that retailers and the police have made a positive difference, putting in place strategies that work to keep retailers and their colleagues safer, and we need stronger legislation to back that up.
“This must be the moment we commit to ending the retail crime crisis, through government, police and retailers working together.”
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