Anna Varle
South West home and social affairs correspondent

It is an offence which can be violent, blatant and carried out by those who have a complete disregard for the law.

Devon and Cornwall Police also describe shoplifting as a "gateway" crime which can lead to escalating behaviour by offenders.

In the video below officers describe how they hope new laws can strength enforcement.

You can find out more here.

Jonathan Morris
BBC News Online

A department store owner has said shoplifting costs his store between £30,000 and £100,000 a year.

David Austin, of Austins in Newton Abbot, Devon, which was founded in 1924, said: "The ones who do it you might say 'professionally' - where they just steal to sell on - they're the worst ones.

"Last week we had a theft that was about £700 by two people.

"They were very nice. They spoke to our staff, they conned us, and they walked out with the merchandise."

More than 60 stores in the town have radios, with staff warning others about known shoplifters in the area, according to Mr Austin.

The town also has more than 140 CCTV cameras which can be used to track shoplifters.

"It gives our staff a feeling of security too, and that's really important," he said.

"It may be difficult to understand, but they don't want to be stressed out thinking who's the next shoplifter all the time.

"They've got to feel relaxed and looking after 99.9% of our customers who are lovely, honest people."

Louise Hobson
BBC North East & Cumbria

Shop owner Stephen Tate (pictured) explains the measures his business has taken to deal with shoplifting, which he calls an “epidemic”.

Some shelves at Addison Newsagents, on Church Road, in Stockton-on-Tees, have reduced stock supplies, a deliberate bid to stop items being stolen.

"This is what it's come to: we've had to put a sign up, we sell multiple packs but we only put one out on show."

Higher value items, such as tea and coffee, had been moved closer to the till and away from the door, he added.

Stephen and his partner Julie have run the business for 38 years and, at 64, he is now looking to retire.

Shoplifting is "out of control across the board on the high street", he says.

However, he adds he feels very safe in the shop.

"We've been here 38 years and we've had no serious incidents," he says. "Nobody's threatened us with anything, just been a bit verbal.

"They push you about a bit and grab you by the collar, a bit of rough and tumble."

Alex Bish
South East Investigations

Shop workers and security staff have been describing the physical and verbal abuse some are facing to highlight the impact on frontline retail workers.

The Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers (Usdaw) says employees have been assaulted, threatened with a knife, spat at and had tins of food thrown at them.

The government says it is making it a specific criminal offence to assault a retail worker.

Gillian Paterson, a union rep from Sussex, tells BBC South East: "No-one should feel afraid to go to work.

"We just hope this new law will hopefully reduce the amount of offending and the amount of abuse staff get".

Laurissa Woolgar (pictured), a shop manager in Canterbury, Kent, adds: "I've been spat at before. It's really upsetting.

"It just makes you not trust quite a lot of people you would normally.

"It's really difficult - you just don't need the abuse."

Ema Sabljak
England Data Unit

We know there have been more than 500,000 recorded shoplifting crimes across England and Wales in 2025-26.

Violence against retailers and shoplifting are often mentioned in the same breath, but it is a different crime in the eyes of the police.

While shoplifting is down slightly year-on-year, robbery of business has nearly doubled from 15,336 in 2024-25 to 29,355 in 2025-26.

In addition to theft, robbery of business includes either violence or a threat of violence.

Last year, the Home Office issued guidance to forces to ensure that crime was recorded separately to shoplifting – likely a factor behind the increase.

Despite the rise, robbery of business remains the less-recorded crime.

It accounts for just 6% of the joint total of the two offence types, with 29,355 recorded crimes last financial year.

Image source, Getty Images

In some smaller local shops, baby formula is now being kept behind the counter to prevent thefts.

But other retailers are introducing different security measures to thwart shoplifters increasingly working in gangs to steal everyday essentials.

North Yorkshire retail worker Tracy says shops are having to constantly adapt their approach as thieves find new ways to take products without paying.

Some deterrents include tagging baby formula and displaying pictures of products at the till so customers have to ask staff for them.

She said: “We are trying every angle to try and prevent, make it difficult; not just come in and fill that bag.

“But the shoplifters get sly and they don't just work on their own, sometimes they work in gangs.”

Tracy says motivation for shoplifting varies.

While some people steal to provide for their families, others resell stolen goods for cash or use the proceeds to fund drug habits, she says.

It comes as the BBC has found the number of shoplifting offences across North Yorkshire remains above pre-Covid-19 pandemic levels, but it has dropped over recent years.

Zoe Applegate
BBC News

Image source, Mariam Issimdar/BBC

A chief constable warns that planned cuts to short-term sentences risk leaving prolific shoplifters free to reoffend.

Paul Sanford, the Chief Constable of Norfolk, is concerned it risks removing the only period when prolific offenders are not actively stealing.

Adequate alternatives need to be found, he says, when the planned early release scheme for some prisoners comes into operation.

“I acknowledge that short-term sentences aren't always successful in preventing offending, but, of course, when someone's in prison, that offending does stop,” says Sanford.

“As those sentences are removed, we need to see something adequate, something meaningful, and something quick that replaces it.”

Sanford says offending by prolific shoplifters is often driven by drug and alcohol abuse and their addictions need to be treated to stop their criminal behaviour.

“We need adequately resourced support services for these individuals,” he says.

Alex Bish
South East Investigations

A national police intelligence unit has spent the last two years working with retailers and police forces to try to join up the dots to build a picture of organised crime groups targeting stores in different areas.

Jim Taylor, a former detective chief superintendent who previously led the unit, said: "We've uncovered organised crime groups responsible for millions of pounds of theft.

"One of our cases impacted across 30 police forces with 57 different officers dealing with that group."

Stephanie Coombes, head of intelligence, said it was about enhancing co-operation between forces to target criminals operating in different parts of the country.

"Where we have individual offences, often another police force won't know that another force is suffering the same offenders, so that collaborative response is much more effective."

Lauren Woodhead
England Data Unit

Here's some more of what we learned when we asked police to tell us about the shoplifting suspects who they had linked to the most offences between 2020-21 and 2025-26.

The highest number for one person was 247. That was in Sussex, where last year alone 10 people were linked to 169 offences.

Across all 27 forces who responded, 270 people were together linked to 28,415 offences. We know that in 2025-26 more than half of shoplifting investigations were complete with no suspect found.

Excluding these crimes, the 270 people were linked to 5% of recorded shoplifting offences.

That means that just 0.0008% of the population was connected to 5% of crimes with a suspect identified.

Ema Sabljak
England Data Unit

Image source, Metropolitan Police

At the height of his offending, Jeff Ashman estimated he walked out of shops with goods worth £400 to £500 on a daily basis.

"It's mind-boggling," he said, describing how much he had stolen from stores in Hastings to fuel his addiction to heroin and crack cocaine.

"I know the misery and grief and despair that I have caused these people for a long period of time," he said.

Shoplifting is now firmly in the past for Ashman, but prolific shoplifters like him continue to plague communities across England.

We asked police about the 10 suspects their forces had most often linked to shoplifting offences between 2020-21 and 2025-26.

It revealed 28,415 recorded offences had been linked to just 270 suspects by the 27 forces which shared data with us.

That is an average of 105 offences per person - and those are just the occasions where a theft was formally reported to police and officers identified a suspect.

• Prolific shoplifters behind more than 28,000 offences, BBC finds

Alex Bish
South East Investigations

Recorded shoplifting offences in England and Wales remain above pre-pandemic levels, but Policing Minister Sarah Jones (pictured) says “we have turned that corner” after a drop in the latest annual figures.

“We are starting to make progress and there has been a 4% dip this year, but we all know there is a lot further that we need to go and a lot more we need to do,” she said.

The Home Office said a small number of prolific offenders were driving a huge share of retail crime.

It said: “Often they have drug addictions or other challenges that need to be addressed. But they need to know that they are going to be punished for what they have done.

“We are looking at what we can do with that cohort of persistent offenders, how do we make sure they get the punishment they need, maybe the drug treatment that they need and, if they’re not in prison, how are we making sure they’re not coming into these shops.”

Richard Price
BBC News, West Midlands

Many shops across the country have closed changing rooms in a bid to prevent thefts.

Even the Headway charity shop in Rugby, which raises money for people with head injuries, has done this as staff say some thieves have been putting on several layers of clothing to sneak garments out.

There was a 10% increase in recorded shoplifting in Warwickshire over the most recent 12-month period up to 2025/26.

In the same period, no suspect was identified in 60% of cases and charges were only brought in 20% of cases.

Warwickshire Police said it had carried out a targeted operation in the town in August.

“We continue to target those responsible for shop theft, act on information provided by businesses and work to prevent offending,” a spokesperson said.

Ema Sabljak
England Data Unit

From high streets to retail parks, shoplifting is impacting our cities and towns.

We have analysed Police UK data which includes locations by neighbourhoods to find out where it is taking place.

It is important to note that data from Greater Manchester Police and Gloucestershire Constabulary was not usable for this analysis.

However, we were able to build a picture of shoplifting hotspots across more than 300 council areas in 2025-26.

Outside of London, the highest shoplifting rates per 1,000 people were seen in Hartlepool, Eastbourne and Lincoln.

You can see the figures for your area using the dropdown search tool below.

Sarah-May Buccieri
Reporting from Grimsby

As I enter a shop on Grimsby's High Street, I feel watched. Partly by the keen eye of the shopkeeper - but also thanks to the presence of numerous CCTV cameras perched in each corner.

The owner tells me he sees shoplifting every day.

I'm on Victoria Street West, which is a hotspot for shop thefts. According to data gathered by the BBC, it is where nearly 10% of recorded incidents in North East Lincolnshire take place.

Figures also show there are 15.7 incidents of shoplifting per 1,000 people in the local authority area. The national rate is 8.1.

Further down the street, I meet Kathryn Dawe, a charity shop manager who says someone attempts to steal from her shop at least twice a week.

"I think it is the lowest of the low," she says. "We're a not-for-profit organisation, so everything that gets taken from our shop means that that's a potential sale that we've lost."

She keeps one eye on her shop as we talk, watching out for any trouble.

She says shoplifters will take "anything", from gift sets to clothes, and dealing with it has become a normal part of her job.

You can read more about how Kathryn is trying to combat the problem here.

Alix Hattenstone
BBC England

Research published last year suggests fewer than three percent of shop thefts are formally reported to the police, retail analyst Catherine Shuttleworth points out.

“I think the frightening thing is that shoplifting has become totally normalised, so it’s like an OK crime - but it isn’t,” she says.

“There’s two sides. Gangs of people going into shops, dragging things off shelves and running out again, and violence against shoplifters. I think we’d all say that is terrible.

“Then there’s the other side - people who shoplift as an everyday thing - they do self-scanning in shops and they don’t pay for all the items in the basket.”

Shuttleworth says there is a misconception that stealing from big companies does not matter, but customers will feel the impact.

“Of course they will notice because prices will go up for everybody. There is a cost to shoplifting that is really real. We’ll all be complaining about it.”

Ema Sabljak
England Data Unit

Image source, EPA

While the number of shoplifting offences recorded in England and Wales in 2025-26 has dropped slightly compared to the previous year, it is still significantly above pre-pandemic levels.

There were 502,011 offences recorded in 2025-26. That's a little lower than the record-breaking total of 525,741 in 2024-25, but still up 50% on the 334,976 recorded a decade previously in 2015-16.

Policing minister Sarah Jones told the BBC we have “turned that corner” on shoplifting - but acknowledged that "we all know there is a lot further that we need to go, and a lot more we need to do".

Tom Holder, spokesperson for the British Retail Consortium, said its surveys suggested these incidents were a fraction of what retailers were facing.

"As we see more action from the police, we see the reporting go back up," he said.

How does this compare with other UK nations?

In Northern Ireland, shoplifting dropped 4% from 8,586 offences in 2024-25 to 8,243 in the most recent financial year. Meanwhile, it rose by 19% in Scotland during the same period to 53,369.

It is a growing concern in many communities across England, with poverty, addiction and organised crime among the causes.

Today we're looking at how shoplifting has risen over the last decade, the threat of violence faced by shop workers and the impact on businesses battling this issue on a daily basis.

It comes as a new BBC analysis found 270 prolific shoplifters had been connected to at least 28,000 crimes across the country.

We'll be hearing from former shoplifters, the police teams unmasking criminal gangs and the people behind community initiatives aiming to turn the tide.

Stay with us throughout the day for more, including the stories shared by listeners across our network of BBC Local radio stations.