Labour leader Anas Sarwar’s plans to tackle retail crime avoid the real solution, writes TERRY MURDEN
Anas Sarwar, the Scottish leader for lost causes, is taking a break from getting nowhere with accident & emergency figures to focus on the surge in shoplifting and call for an end to the “chaos on our streets” under John Swinney’s government. His solution? Bringing back crime prevention officers.
Yup, an army of advisers will unleash their clipboard diplomacy on the organised gangs plundering shelves in plain sight of CCTV, store detectives, security tags and a battery of other measures that have already failed to stop a staggering 129% rise in shop crime since 2021.
Mr Sarwar wants the recalled army of CPOs to be backed by 360 police officers who are “wasting” thousands of hours in A&E departments and in our courts. Well, that should please the hard-pressed doctors and nurses and court staff who’ll be left to deal with those who can’t behave in our hospitals and even in the corridors of the judicial system.
It may be an attempt to divert attention from the Mandelson scandal but, to give him credit, the Scottish Labour leader is making a worthy case for dealing with a problem that is getting worse. Figures published by Police Scotland show that in the year ending September 2025, there were 48,564 recorded crimes of shoplifting, sharply up on the 21,175 recorded four years earlier. Despite this surge, just 2,854 people were convicted in 2023/24.
What Labour’s indignation and finger-pointing at the SNP fails to take into account is that this as much, if not more, of a problem south of the border. Shoplifting in England and Wales – where Labour is responsible for tackling crime – has reached record levels, with police-recorded offences hitting their highest figures since current recording practices began more than two decades ago.
In England and Wales there were 530,643 police-recorded shoplifting offences in the year to March 2025, a 20% increase from the previous year.
Making this more embarrassing for Mr Sarwar is that experts believe these official statistics are an understatement. The British Retail Consortium (BRC) estimates there were more than 20 million incidents annually in the year to August 2024, suggesting that only a small fraction are reported to the police.
Shoplifting cost UK retailers £2.2 billion in 2023/2024. It is a major trigger for violence and abuse against shop workers with one union survey finding that 77% of retail staff experienced verbal abuse and 10% were assaulted in a 12-month period.
What is required, and is not mentioned by Mr Sarwar, is tougher penalties on the perpetrators who have been encouraged by a policy of treating shoplifting as a low level crime with no action taken below a certain theft threshold.
Only latterly has there been any shift in acknowledging the involvement of organised criminal networks and the need for zero tolerance of abuse, both physical and verbal.
Legislation has been toughened and, as Daily Business reported last month, a Retail Crime Taskforce in Scotland has had some early success in combining various measures to detect crime in action and identify offenders, though the numbers of arrests remains small and there is no indication that the penalties being dished out are preventing re-offending.
What the public do not want is soft touch policing by colourful booklets and notices in shop windows asking criminals to kindly leave their knives and batons at the door.
Terry Murden was Scotland Editor and Business Editor at The Sunday Times, Business Editor at The Scotsman, and Business and City Editor at Scotland on Sunday. He is now Editor of Daily Business
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