Reported assaults on shop staff in Scotland have increased by 50% year on year since Holyrood introduced a standalone offence aimed at protecting retail workers facing escalating levels of violence since the pandemic.
Retail representatives across the rest of the UK are calling for similar protection as the most recent figures compiled for the Guardian by Police Scotland reveal the shocking rates of assaults and threatening or abusive behaviour against retail workers since the legislation came into force in August 2021.
Figures from 2023 running up to the end of November showed that there were 2,233 reported assaults, an average of 203 each month and an increase of 50% from the previous year.
Likewise, there were 2,582 reports of threatening or abusive behaviour in the same period until November 2023 – an average of 235 every month – another 50% rise.
The Protection of Workers Act, which was brought before Holyrood as a member’s bill by Daniel Johnson, of Scottish Labour, created a new statutory offence of assaulting, threatening or abusing a retail worker and was backed unanimously by MSPs.
“During the pandemic we became acutely aware of our dependence on retail workers,” explains Johnson. “That was a real driver for this law, along with the tendency for government to ask them to uphold public policy at the till point, whether that’s plastic bag changes or age restrictions on products.”
He added: “No one should face violence at work, yet we’ve seen a further escalation of that around shop theft with the cost of living crisis creating a perfect storm. Retail workers tell me their day-to-day reality means routinely wearing body-worn cameras and fearing violence and aggression, whether its people hurling abuse if asked for proof of age or throwing punches when challenged about shop lifting.”
Many want to see similar legislation brought in by the Westminster parliament to cover other areas of the UK.
The Scottish figures show that a standalone offence “is clearly working”, according to the British Retail Consortium. Their latest crime survey, carried out last spring, which tallies self-reports from the whole of the UK, found 850 incidents of violence and abuse every day.
In 2022, the consortium successfully campaigned for an amendment to Westminster’s Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, which recommended that violence towards retail workers should be sentenced with an aggravating factor.
But there is some frustration that no data is being collected on the use of this aggravation, though a UK government spokesperson said it was “confident that judges are taking [it] into consideration for relevant cases”.
Retailers are playing their part, spending hundreds of millions on security staff, CCTV, security tags, and other anti-crime measures, says Graham Wynn, the assistant director of regulatory affairs at the consortium.
A separate offence would mean a tougher sentence, better deterrence and result in police recording data around such incidents, “giving them a better idea of the scale of the problem, so they can best tackle it”.
The shopworkers’ union Usdaw is also calling for a standalone offence, arguing that the epidemic of shoplifting has become a “a major flashpoint for violence and abuse against shopworkers”.
Paddy Lillis, the union’s general secretary, said: “It is shocking that two-thirds of our members working in retail are suffering abuse from customers, with far too many experiencing threats and violence. Six in ten of these incidents were triggered by theft from shops.
“Shoplifting is not a victimless crime … Having to deal with repeated and persistent shoplifters can cause issues beyond the theft itself like anxiety, fear and in some cases physical harm to retail workers. We are saying loud and clear that enough is enough, this should never be part of the job.”
