CRIME against retail store workers should be “treated with the same seriousness as those on police and other emergency workers”, Home Affairs Committee said on Tuesday (29), seeking a new standalone criminal offence to protect retail workers from violence and abuse in England and Wales.
“Other public workers have rightly been afforded extra protection by the law in recognition of the public service they provide and the increased risks they face, and a standalone offence for assault on emergency workers has produced promising early results in increasing prosecutions,” Home Affairs Committee chair, Yvette Cooper, said.
“Violence and abuse towards shop workers must be treated with the same seriousness and those workers must be afforded similar protection in law,” said the Labour MP, adding that it is “completely unacceptable that these attacks have become so commonplace in our society”.
Cooper also said “shameful” figures showed that abuse and assaults against retailers had increased during the pandemic, at a time when they were the “lifeblood of communities”.
Violence against retail employees has reportedly escalated over the past five years, increasing further through the pandemic, a time during which both small and larger firms have reported extensive verbal and physical abuse.
Citing a survey by Association of Convenience Stores (ACS), which says that only one in five who reported incidents "were satisfied with the response from the police", the committee said that the assault on retail workers is "becoming endemic in British society”, and the police response is failing to match the scale of the problem.
Research by ACS also found that 89 per cent of individuals working in local shops had experienced some form of abuse, while the British Retail Consortium says that the number of violent incidents or abuse against shop workers has risen in past few years.
The National Federation of Retail Newsagents told the inquiry that they thought a "strong police response" to simple shop theft "might serve to stop future, more serious incidents, but it is here that the police response is weakest".
Supermarkets Morrisons and Sainsbury's also told MPs their staff had been threatened with knives, firearms and even syringes. Marks and Spencer added that local police have "struggled to respond to reports of assaults" in their shops due to which colleagues have become less inclined to report assaults to the police, as they believe that there is “no point” when it is likely no action will follow.
Amit Puntambekar, 28, a retail store owner, told BBC that the police view crime against retail worker inside a store as a “soft crime” because when a theft happens there is no penalty to the state or the government, adding “we will end up paying the liability for it”.
Bob Blackman MP speaks during the event