Callum Anderson

I am pleased to support the Bill, which will be welcomed in urban and rural communities across Buckingham and Bletchley. Given the time constraints, I will focus my remarks on part 3, on the protection of retail workers. I have a particular interest in Britain’s 3.5 million retail workers, not least because my mum is one of them, having worked on the shop floor at Morrisons for over 20 years. During that time, she has seen it all—the good, the bad and the ugly. In my conversations with her, particularly over the last decade, two themes have become much more prevalent, and they have already been raised by Members on both sides of the House. The first theme is the increasingly casual and habitual nature of shoplifting and other retail crime. Data from the British Retail Consortium suggests that this is already costing businesses across the country more than £2 billion a year. In the Thames Valley police area, retail crime rose by over a third between April 2023 and February 2024. This year alone, the Co-op store in Winslow has faced two violent raids aiming to remove its cash machine. This is not just petty crime; too often, it is organised. It is this kind of emboldened criminality that must be stopped. Such activity is not just a blot on a company’s balance sheet; it punishes good-faith customers and demoralises the workers, who take pride in the work that they do. That is why I welcome the repeal of section 176 of the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014, to finally call time on Britain’s open invitation to criminals to steal goods worth £200 or less. Secondly, I want to touch on the growing occurrence of abuse and the threat of violence faced by too many shop workers in their workplace. In a 2024 survey of USDAW members, more than two thirds of retail workers revealed they had been verbally abused, almost half had been threatened, and one in five had been physically assaulted while doing their job. That is clearly totally intolerable. Nobody in this country should go to work fearing for their own physical safety. I believe that we in this House, with our security guards and our armed police, have a particular duty to ensure that those who work in our shops feel just as safe as we do.