TM Eye is a company that hires former detectives, most of whom wear a uniform, some of whom are in plain clothes, to mingle with shoppers. In many respects, then, they’re a lot like a police force – except for the bit where they investigate shoplifting. They were called in by a benighted M&S, which had lost £500 worth of steak and many bottles of prosecco, and found the suspect relatively easily, with the aid of some cutting-edge technology known as CCTV. The regular police had declined to investigate, though have not so far been drawn on whether that’s because they are under-resourced or the pilfering scene is just too well-populated.
There are currently 30,000 thefts from shops a day in the UK, and the British Retail Consortium estimated that it cost the sector £953m last year. Even if you take with a pinch of salt the narrative that these thefts are mainly committed by criminal gangs and suspect the cost of living crisis has a lot to do with it, you can still see the problem if shoplifting is effectively decriminalised: it’s a major degradation of the civic sphere if supermarket employees aren’t safe at work, and they can’t take the risk of putting meat on the shelves. This is where we are: if you want law and order, you have to buy it.
The notion of crime being “effectively decriminalised” previously gained traction not for shoplifting, but for rape: the former victims’ commissioner Dame Vera Baird, who resigned from the post last year, referred to it in her first report in 2020, and reflected the following year that the decline in prosecutions since 2016 had been catastrophic.
The stats tell a sorry story. Figures released in 2021 showed massive declines in legal aid – both in terms of workload and expenditure – since 2011. This trend cannot be wholly explained by the cuts to legal aid, as part of the belt-tightening package: it is also because criminals are not being caught and prosecuted.
Austerity had further consequences for those cases that were prosecuted: by 30 September last year, 28% of cases yet to be completed had been in the system for more than a year. Judges speculated about the knock-on effect in civil proceedings – non-molestation order applications, domestic violence protection orders, antisocial behaviour injunctions, cases where police had power to take action but didn’t. The stats can’t tell that story: those statistics aren’t even collected.
There has, in other words, never been a better time to be a criminal in the UK, and the unlucky few who are prosecuted can take heart from the fact that, in any event, whatever the verdict, there probably isn’t the space to send them to prison. It’s a big deal for any government to lose its grip on law and order to the extent that citizens and businesses are having to hire their own private police forces. It’s the sign of a de-developing nation. But that’s not a message ministers and their allies want to hear.
I was on the radio with Andrea Leadsom, former minister and senior Tory MP, on the day the justice secretary, Alex Chalk, announced an end to prison sentences under 12 months in a bid to free up some space in the estate. Given the enormity of that, my take was pretty mild: it’s a shame, I said, to see what 13 years of austerity can do to the basic functions of government. Leadsom objected that this was “anti-Conservative”: as though I’d accidentally revealed some disqualifying bias, and standards of impartiality in broadcasting amount to never blaming anyone for anything.
There is a narrative building around the party of government, that all shocks are essentially external, and we should all pull together to deal with them as best we can, and Leadsom reflected that. It’s understandable; when the consequences of 13 years of increasingly chaotic decisions are all landing at once, plausible defence lines are few. Tactically, they need to keep the conversation as broad as possible, at the level of “isn’t the world terrible?” But this is the party of law and order – and it can’t divert our attention for ever from examining its actual record in the crucial area of law and order.
It is some record, and not in a good way: no grip, no plan, no direction. Functionally speaking, they’re basically anarchists.
We know it, but so too, it seems, does M&S, as it seeks its own solutions to crime that goes unchecked – as it turns to former detectives to guard the prosecco and the steaks.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
