The Office for National Statistics’ April release was greeted in some quarters as long-awaited good news for retail. Police-recorded shoplifting offences in England and Wales fell by 1% in the year ending December 2025, down to 509,566. After consecutive years of double-digit rises – the previous ONS release in October showed a 13% increase – any movement in the opposite direction reads like a turning point.
It isn’t. The British Retail Consortium’s own data, published alongside its 2025 Crime Survey, recorded 5.5 million detected shoplifting incidents over the same period, costing retailers an estimated £400 million. The gap between the two numbers – roughly 5 million incidents – is the real story. For anyone running a shop floor or briefing a board on loss, the ONS figure tells you almost nothing about what is happening in the aisles.
Why the two numbers diverge so sharply
The ONS counts what police record. The BRC counts what retailers detect. The first depends on whether a member of staff calls 101, whether the offender is identified, and whether the offence makes it onto a force’s books. The second depends only on what loss-prevention teams, CCTV operators, and frontline colleagues actually witness.
Most stores stopped reporting routine theft to police years ago. The reasons are well-documented: low charge rates for thefts under £200, slow response times, and the practical reality that a guard cannot leave the shop floor to spend an afternoon waiting for an officer. The result is a structural under-count baked into the official figures.
The BRC’s crime policy adviser Lucy Whing put it directly when the ONS data landed: the official numbers “likely underestimate the issue, as they only capture reported incidents.” That is not a complaint about methodology. It is a statement of fact about what police-recorded crime data measures.
What the BRC survey actually shows
The 2025 Retail Crime Survey is the most comprehensive picture of UK retail crime available. Its headline figures for the year covered:
- 5.5 million shoplifting incidents detected by retailers, costing approximately £400 million.
- Over 20 million total theft incidents across the sector – roughly 55,000 every day — up from 16 million the previous year.
- 1,600 incidents of violence and abuse against retail staff every day.
- £1.8 billion spent by retailers on crime prevention in a single year, up from £1.2 billion the year before.
The Federation of Independent Retailers, representing smaller stores, noted that even with the ONS’s marginal decline, the figures remain “shocking” and that incidents are levelling off but at “unacceptably high” levels. For independent retailers, the under-reporting gap is wider still, because they have fewer resources to log every incident in the first place.
Organised crime is the missing variable
The BRC has been consistent on one point: the growth in retail crime is not a recovery-driven trend or a cost-of-living blip. It is being driven, in significant part, by organised gangs that target multiple stores in coordinated sweeps, often over a single trading day, often across regions. These groups are not the opportunistic individuals the ONS figure was historically designed to count.
Standard reporting protocols struggle with this pattern. A four-person team that hits six branches of the same chain in an afternoon may register as six separate incidents in store logs, none in police records if no individual member is identified, and one organised event in the chain’s intelligence file. The ONS framework was never designed to capture coordinated commercial theft at that scale.
What this means for retailers
For anyone with operational responsibility for a UK store or a chain, three implications follow.
Treat the ONS figure as the floor, not the ceiling. If your board is using police-recorded shoplifting data to set loss-prevention budgets, the numbers are anchored too low. Pair them with the BRC survey and your own internal incident logs before any budget conversation.
Improve internal reporting before relying on external benchmarks. The under-count begins in-store. A staff team that logs every detected incident – including those not escalated to police – gives leadership a true picture of exposure. Body-worn cameras, structured incident-reporting forms, and a clear escalation matrix all close the gap between what happens and what gets counted.
Invest in visible, trained guarding for higher-risk stores. The BRC’s £1.8 billion prevention spend reflects what the sector is already doing. Uniformed SIA-licensed officers on the shop floor reduce both theft and, critically, the violence-and-abuse incidents that now run at 1,600 a day. Investment in trained personnel typically delivers measurable reductions where loss-prevention technology alone has plateaued.
The headline matters less than the trend
The “1% decline” headline is technically accurate and operationally meaningless. The volume of detected theft in UK retail has grown to a scale where the official numbers cover less than 10% of what stores actually see. Any strategy built on the official figure is starting from the wrong baseline.
Our team works with retailers across London and the wider UK to bring incident reporting, guarding, and loss-prevention into a single operational picture – one that matches what staff are seeing on the floor, not what makes it into the quarterly police bulletin.
Need a security review?
If your store or chain is reviewing its retail security posture in light of the BRC’s 2025 figures, we can help. Our team provides SIA-licensed retail security across London and the UK, including uniformed guarding, loss-prevention support, and incident-reporting frameworks. For multi-site operators we also coordinate cover with our wider manned guarding teams.
Call us on 020 3700 0967, email info@secureonsitesecurity.co.uk, or use our contact form to arrange a no-obligation site review.
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