Sarah Jones

The hon. Member is right that Victim Support and other organisations give really important support to people in such situations. Across different Departments, we all have a role to play in trying to stop this abuse and the retail crime that goes alongside so much of it. I will go into that in more detail. First, I will set out the statistics on shop theft, which drives a lot of the abuse that we see and is often perpetrated by prolific offenders. In the year before we came to power, there was a 30% rise in shop theft, and in the past year there has been a 1% fall. A 1% fall does not sound great, but when we compare it with a 30% rise, it shows that we are completely turning the tide. I know that members of the public will say, “Well, that’s just statistics; that’s not my experience,” and it will take us a while to make people feel safer and tackle the huge problem that we still have. I want to reassure Members that—my hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly asked about this—because of the policing interventions that we have done and because of what a lot of shops have done, we are beginning to turn the tide on shop theft. That is important. A lot of the larger retailers admittedly have more funds to do this, but the Co-operative Group, for example, has done incredible things to design out crime in its shops, and it has seen the biggest fall compared with other retailers. Lots of others are doing interesting things, whether that is having live facial recognition; designing out the ability for people to get behind the shop counter and steal some of the alcohol that might be there; having cameras on shop workers; or having security people. All those things are undoubtedly making a difference, and so is the ability of our police to respond. We have been clear with our wonderful police that we want them in our neighbourhoods tackling this type of crime. We have already seen over 3,000 more police in our neighbourhoods, and we have committed to having 13,000. The Liberal Democrat spokesperson talked about police numbers. The previous Government cut 20,000 police and then recruited 20,000 police, but they put 12,000 of them behind desks. Our measure is not about exact numbers—we want 13,000 more police in our communities, and we want outcomes. That is what we are driving towards. There are other things that we can do and that we are doing in this space that will also make a difference, and we will keep striving to do more. The hon. Member for Weald of Kent talked about technology, databases and wanting to cut bureaucracy for our police. I 100% agree with that. Last week, we launched PoliceAI with £75 million of funding to use AI to take away some of the nonsense bureaucracy that our police have to do. I have given it two first tasks in relation to outward-facing technology: one is to tackle tool theft and the other is to tackle retail crime. There are lots of quite good systems that different parts of the country are using to more easily record shop theft and upload imagery and CCTV. We want to design AI that can read across all of those so that the police can easily see and bring together who the prolific offenders are. There was talk of prolific offenders in this debate, and it is true that a small cohort of people are responsible for a large amount of retail crime and abuse against shop workers. They are often people with very complex needs—they will have an addiction; they will be drug addicts or alcoholics—and we in the Home Office are designing a programme to target those prolific offenders. Some areas do that already, and people have been doing it increasingly, but there are things that we can put in place to help us really target that prolific cohort, whether that is providing the support they need to get into treatment or more interventions to make sure they cannot do what they want to. My hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Danny Beales) said that we should be doing more to use things like orders to stop people coming into a community, or tagging. I think we need to be using all of those more, and we are designing a programme of work to do exactly that. My hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly asked if I would meet USDAW, and I am always very happy to do that. I have done so many times, but it is probably timely that I meet it again now that the Crime and Policing Act has been passed. He also asked how we would measure progress. We will measure what happens with the absolute numbers and the reporting of these issues, and whether people are reporting—whether that is through USDAW or our links in the retail sector. We will measure it through the crime statistics and what is happening as a result. My hon. Friend also asked, importantly, why the provision is defined as being just about shop workers and why we did not make it wider to include transport workers or people who work in banks, for example. We deliberately kept it narrow to avoid any ambiguity in the courts. I know people disagree with that, but we just have to agree to disagree; that is what we have done in the legislation. However, if the legislation makes a marked difference, which we hope it will, of course we will need to look at whether the provision should apply elsewhere. I have met representatives from banks, and I have had conversations about the particular challenges they have. They face the problem of abuse—I do not want to deny that—but the frequent protests they are increasingly experiencing are a slightly different issue, and one that we are talking to them about to try to support them through. With the number of police in our communities going up; with the new rule that all thefts under £200 have to be investigated; with the new tech, IT and AI that can help us read across all these different systems; with the law in place; with the police giving a strong message that we want to see people punished for abusing shop workers; and with the work that we are beginning to do on prolific offenders, hopefully we will increasingly see results. The fundamental point that my hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly and everybody here has made is that we cannot accept this as normal behaviour—it is not. We will not tolerate it, and we will keep working until we tackle it.