Suella Braverman must stop the shoplifters, says RUTH SUNDERLAND

When Ken Murphy, the boss of Britain’s biggest supermarket chain Tesco, spoke out last month against the tide of shoplifting and violence against staff at stores, he lit a blue touchpaper.

He has performed a valuable public service. Until he highlighted it in our sister paper The Mail on Sunday, which has launched an anti-shoplifting campaign, the epidemic of theft and thuggery in shops was not being taken seriously enough.

With a couple of honourable exceptions, including the Co-op, other store bosses were reluctant to speak out about the scourge, probably for fear of scaring off customers.

The silence was part of the problem, because it enabled ministers and police chiefs to ignore it. But when the chief executive of Tesco speaks, it’s a game-changer: everyone has to listen.

His intervention has kept retail crime at the top of the news agenda everywhere. With all due deference to Russell Brand, it is hard to think of a topic that has struck such a nerve. Murphy and the CEOs of 80 other stores are this week asking for a meeting with Home Secretary Suella Braverman to present her with their demands for changes in the law and tougher policing.

Election boost: A strong stance on shoplifting would be a vote winner for the Conservatives

A strong stance on shoplifting would be a vote winner for the Conservatives.

The current climate of cynicism and impunity, where most offences go unpunished, is an affront to many voters. At the core of this is the misconception that shoplifting is a minor or victimless crime, apparently shared by singer Robbie Williams, who made ill-judged jokes on social media.

One wonders what his fans who work in retail made of that.

Shoplifting is non-trivial. It is going up at a time when reported crime in general is falling: there were more than 342,000 cases in the year to March, an increase of nearly 25 per cent on the year before. Those figures, almost certainly, are under-estimated.

As offences are on the rise, prosecutions have been declining. Just over 21,000 people in England and Wales were prosecuted for shoplifting in the year to June 2022 – around a quarter of the number a decade ago.

In isolation, many incidents of retail crime do not involve large losses or severe harm, but the cumulative effect is enormous.

Retailers lost nearly £1bn to shoplifting in the year to April 2022 and spent more than £700m on crime prevention. Even more significant is the physical and psychological damage to retail staff and customers who are victims of abusive or violent incidents.

Communities will be blighted if stores are forced to put up the shutters because of persistent theft and attacks.

Closures are already happening in the US, where the discount chain Target announced last week it is shutting outlets.

What can be done? Attacks on shop staff should be made a specific offence. Coupled with some exemplary sentencing, that would send out a strong message.

Police forces are overstretched but retailers complain bitterly about the inadequate response. That needs to improve.

There are other measures including surveillance in stores and helping stores to identify and ban the worst offenders.

One idea is a ‘Most Wanted’ rogues’ gallery, which retailers could access online from the police. There are pitfalls, but a thief’s right to privacy should not trump the rights of others to work and shop in safety.

Our high streets have been battered by a series of setbacks. The last thing it needs is an unchecked crime wave.