‘Wild West Britain’: TINY proportion of shoplifters will end up in jail under new Labour measures, warn Tories, despite Starmer claiming ‘tide could be turning’ on retail crime epidemic
Labour’s ‘soft justice’ reforms will result in just 0.3 per cent of convicted thieves ending up behind bars each year, new data shows.
Shocking figures revealed by the Tories show thousands of shoplifters will avoid prison every year thanks to sentencing changes that came into force last month.
It comes just days after Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer boasted that there were early signs that the post-pandemic shoplifting epidemic appeared to be ending.
The Conservatives have predicted that the Government’s criminal justice reforms will actually make retail theft worse, calling them a ‘thieves’ covenant’.
Labour’s reforms strongly discourage judges from handing down sentences of less than 12 months and set out how they should instead impose suspended sentences unless there are ‘exceptional circumstances’.
Official government data shows that only 144 shoplifters dealt with by the courts in the year to September – just 0.3 per cent of the total number of 46,300 prisoners – were sentenced to more than 12 months in prison.
During the same period, 12,590 shoplifters were sentenced to less than 12 months in prison; This means they can now expect to receive a suspended sentence under Labour’s changes.
Conservatives based their research on the assumption that similar patterns of punishment would be repeated going forward.
Shadow Justice Secretary Nick Timothy said: ‘Labour has written a thieves charter under which almost all shoplifters will avoid custody and avoid facing the consequences of their crimes.
‘He is weak and irresponsible.
‘We should be keeping more people locked up for longer, not making it easier for them to escape prison altogether.’
Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp said: ‘Shoplifting is a scourge. Shelves are cleaned in plain sight because criminals know there will be no consequences.
‘Under Labour’s plan, only 144 shoplifters will go to prison each year; whereas there are 519,000 shoplifting crimes.
‘With no prison for thieves, this will be exacerbated under Labor.’
He added: ‘Only the Conservatives have a plan to fix this.
‘We will put 10,000 more police officers on the streets, restore visible policing, support officers to act decisively and ensure crime and anti-social behavior is faced with real consequences.’
In a speech to shop workers’ union USDAW on Monday, the Prime Minister praised a 17 per cent increase in the number of accused shoplifters and a slight decrease in thefts recorded by police.
Official crime figures published last week showed recorded burglary offenses in England and Wales fell by one per cent last year to 509,566 incidents, after rising significantly each year since Covid.
‘According to the latest statistics, shop theft has decreased. “There is only a slight decline but the tide could turn,” Sir Keir said.
The Workers’ Penal Code, which prevents the use of most prison sentences of less than 12 months, came into force on March 22.
The average prison sentence for thieves from the year to September was just 2.4 months.
Justice Secretary David Lammy said: ‘The Tories are completely shameless.
‘The 46,000 shoplifting convictions complained about by the Conservatives are the highest since 2017, while the 144 people jailed for more than 12 months are higher than any sentence in the last eight years of the Conservative Government.
‘It was the last Conservative Government to introduce the £200 threshold, effectively decriminalizing shoplifting.
‘The Labor Government is tackling this scourge head-on by putting an extra 3,000 neighborhood police officers on the streets, while also removing the Conservative Party’s effective immunity against thieves stealing goods worth less than £200.’
Despite the slight drop in recorded crimes, retailers stressed that the wave of theft crime was far from over and described how stores had stopped reporting every incident to the police.
Lucy Whing of the British Retail Consortium said last week that her figures showed the real number of cases last year was 5.5 million cases.
Jason Tarry, chairman of high street giant John Lewis, said shoplifting had reached the worst levels he had seen “in my 35 years in retail”.
“These are clear signals that legislators are willing to stand shoulder to shoulder with retailers to tackle the problem, but we all know more is needed to make a difference,” he wrote in The Telegraph.
He called on the courts to ‘use the punitive tools at their disposal more consistently to bring offenders to justice and assist in their rehabilitation’.
