Crime Reduction - Helping to Reduce Crime in Your Area

Further Information

The scale of crime against business.

Although the British Crime Survey shows that overall crime rates fore personal and household crime have come down by 36% since 1997, police figures for England and Wales 2008-09 indicate that the total number of shoplifting offences recorded by the police was 320,846; this is an increase of 10% from 2007-08.

During the same period robbery of business property also increased by 2%.  

Crimes against business such as shop-lifting are thought to be under-reported and we are working with trade associations to obtain a more detailed picture of crime in different regions making use of alternative sources of information. This will include undertaking a new Commercial Victimisation Survey with results due in 2010.

The Crime Strategy

The Home Office’s Crime Strategy outlines its overall approach to tackling crime.

The Strategy has been updated in 2009 to include progress, developments and new challenges that we face.  It sets out a refreshed and sharpened set of priorities that show how together we can keep communities safe and increase public confidence.

For more information click here.

Partnership Working

The Retail Crime Action Plan outlines our intention to strengthen further partnership working to tackle crime against business.   Our partnership works at the national, regional and local level and involves the government, police, business trade representatives, trade unions and staff associations, government offices, crime and disorder reduction partnerships and community safety partners.

We have also worked with partners to produce the following guides

• Crime against business – What partnerships need to know 
• Crime against business – What businesses need to know 
• Neighbourhood Policing Guide
  

Crime Prevention and designing out crime

The design against crime initiative seeks to encourage businesses to consider the crime resistance of their designs and systems before launching them.

We have also worked with major businesses on the chipping of goods initiative and have invested £5.5 million in demonstrating the benefits of electronic tagging throughout the retail supply chain.

The Design Council is also leading work to launch a new competion in September 2009 to find ideas to tackle retail crime.

Secure by Design focuses on crime prevention at the design, layout and construction stages of homes and commercial premises and promotes the use of security standards for a wide range of applications and products.

For other crime prevention advice from the Metropolitan Police Service click this link. 

National Retail Crime Steering Group

The purpose of a National Retail Crime Steering Group is to reduce retail crime. It will seek to improve the co-ordination and delivery of retail crime reduction initiatives by all stakeholders.  The terms of reference of the group are to:

1. Assess and improve the tools available to measure the scale of retail crime nationally, and encourage Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships/ Community Safety Partnerships to evaluate retail crime reduction initiatives locally
2. Identify and document initiatives currently being undertaken by government, police, local business crime reduction partnerships and retailers to combat crime
3. Identify and promote effective practice for retailers to adopt in working with government, police and local partnerships, to reduce retail crime, and the underlying causes of crime.
4. Assess and improve local engagement between retailers and neighbourhood police, taking into account local crime reduction plans
5. Investigate the opportunities for improving retailer involvement in Home Office and Ministry of Justice policy development.
6. Encourage the retail sector to include crime prevention at the heart of all its business policies and practices

Last update: Thursday, August 06, 2009