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Labour leader Keir Starmer has reaffirmed the party’s commitment to cracking down on abuse against shop workers should his party emerge victorious at the general election.
Starmer reiterated the promise from his party’s manifesto to introduce a specific offence for assaults on store staff.
He made this commitment to a group of Morrisons employees at the supermarket’s Swindon branch according to The Mirror.
Starmer said: “It’s not just the shoplifting, it’s also the abuse and threats. This is such an important issue. We have to crackdown on it. We also need to reverse this idea that anything under £200 that people steal is not going to be actionable.”
Conservative party leader Rishi Sunak agreed to include violence against retail staff in the Criminal Justice bill earlier this year.
However, this fell by the wayside after he called an election for 4 July.
Violence and abuse against retail workers jumped almost 50% as the number of incidents rose to 1,300 per day in 2022/23 from almost 870 per day the year before, according to data from the British Retail Consortium.
This rise comes despite retailers investing heavily in crime prevention, spending £1.2bn on measures such as CCTV, increased security personnel, and body worn cameras, up from £722m the previous year.
The cost of theft to retailers went up to £1.8bn from £953m the previous year, meaning the total cost of crime to retailers stood at £3.3bn, double the previous year.
