Crime Reduction - Helping to Reduce Crime in Your Area

Business Crime

What are the current facts and figures?

Home Office Commercial Victimisation Survey (CVS) 2002

The Commercial Victimisation Survey (CVS) 2002 interviewed by telephone around 4,000 managers of retail premises and 2,500 managers of manufacturing premises about:

  • their business's experiences of crime in previous 12 months.

  • whether they had reported the incidents to the police

  • the extent of losses suffered

  • their crime prevention precautions and their concerns about the problems of crime and anti-social behaviour in the local area.

It is the first Government national survey of crimes against manufacturers and retailers in England and Wales since 1994 and gives us a clearer picture of the levels and types of crime suffered by businesses. A summary report (published Nov 04) and a final report (published on-line July 05) are available at the link above.

British Crime Survey

The 1999 Home Office/Health and Safety Executive (HSE) report "Violence at Work: Findings from the British Crime Survey" identified occupations with a higher than average risk of work related violence.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) defines work-related violence as:

Any incident in which a person is abused, threatened or assaulted in circumstances relating to their work

This can include verbal abuse or threats as well as physical attacks.

Overall, the risk of violence to retail staff was estimated to be 4.9%, compared to an average risk of 2.6%. This can be broken down into risk of assault at 1.8% compared to an average risk of 1.2%, and the risk of threatening behaviour at 3.5% compared to an average risk of 1.5%.

More recent statistics on work related violence can be found on the HSE website.

Links to other surveys

Last update: Friday, February 29, 2008

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