UK Parliament / Open data

Criminal Justice Bill

Proceeding contribution from Meg Hillier (Labour) in the House of Commons on Tuesday, 28 November 2023. It occurred during Debate on bills on Criminal Justice Bill.

The right hon. Lady and I are perhaps surprised to find ourselves in such agreement, but absolutely. I will finish highlighting what the Co-op does, because I think it plays into what happens in smaller stores.

The staff pull together enough information to make it evidentially strong enough to take through the prosecution service and into court, but even then they often struggle to get any interest—and of course, if the stores clamp down in one area by putting more security into a shop where there has been a particular issue, the criminals just move to the next property. We have to deal with this problem area-wide, which is why it needs to be a police matter and not just dealt with store by store. Crucially, as the right hon. Lady says, if the Co-op, Tesco or Sainsbury’s clamps down on a particular store or stores in an area, other shops are left with less support. They are often small corner shops with a lone shopkeeper, and the fear for them is palpable. It is really worrying. If they know that the police are not going to come, they just have to back off and their goods are stolen.

The Co-op that I visited has lost £155,000-worth of goods in the first six months of this year. For a small shop, that is the difference between existing and not. We rely on those local shops, and in lockdown we needed their support. Now we need to support them, and this needs to be a higher priority for the police. The Government could also be doing more. This is something that my own party is keen to look at. I am a Labour and Co-op Member of Parliament, so I am particularly keen to see this dealt with. I was struck as I talked to the staff in store by how helpless they feel when someone pretty much jumps across the till to take cigarettes and booze. They have to hide things, and they have to stock dummy products, which is inconvenient for customers. Of course, customers sometimes go into one of these shops and find that the goods they want to buy are not there because, as my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall (Florence Eshalomi) said, the shop has just had a large-volume raid.

Shoplifting needs to be taken much more seriously. Nobody should go to work and expect to be attacked. Everyone I spoke to had suffered an incident of shoplifting. Even if they stepped back and were not violently attacked, it is still very damaging psychologically. No wonder we see such turnover among shop workers.

Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
741 c777 
Session
2023-24
Chamber / Committee
House of Commons chamber
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