The British Retail Consortium published its Crime Report 2026 on 24 February 2026, covering the year from 1 September 2024 to 31 August 2025. It is the closest thing UK retail has to an industry-wide baseline, and it is worth quoting properly rather than reaching for whichever number makes the strongest case. Here are the published figures, followed by what we think they do and do not support.
The published figures
- Violence and abuse against shop workers: around 1,600 incidents a day, down from around 2,000 the previous year, a fall of roughly 20%.
- Incidents involving physical violence: around 118 a day, largely unchanged year on year.
- Incidents involving a weapon: around 36 a day.
- Pre-pandemic comparison: 455 incidents a day in 2019/20, so the current figure is still more than three times that level.
- Shop theft: 5.5 million detected incidents, costing retailers close to £400 million.
- Delivery theft: losses exceeding £100 million.
- Crime prevention spend by retailers: almost £5.5 billion over the past five years.
- Police response: around half of retailers now report a positive police response.
- Customer theft is described as firmly embedded across the industry and accounts for the majority of recorded crime.
What the numbers support
The honest headline is that the direction changed. After several years in which every retail crime release was worse than the last, violence and abuse came down by about a fifth. The BRC has been careful to frame this as hard-won progress rather than a solved problem, and that framing is right.
The more useful detail sits underneath the headline. Total incidents fell, but the incidents at the violent end did not. Physical violence was roughly flat and weapons still featured around 36 times a day. If you run stores, that gap is the whole story: the average shift got quieter, and the worst shift did not. Staff experience the second number, not the first.
What the numbers do not support
A few claims get attached to this report that it does not actually make, and we would rather not repeat them. The report does not publish a prosecution rate broken down by evidence quality, so nobody can honestly say that better CCTV packs cause more charging decisions on the strength of it. It does not break down shrinkage by repeat-offender concentration. And it does not compare growth in forced entry against growth in in-hours theft.
Those things may well be true. We think some of them are. But they are not in this report, and a loss-prevention lead who repeats them in a board paper will get caught out by anyone who reads the source.
What we would plan for, and why
This next part is our reading rather than the BRC's finding, and we have separated it deliberately.
1. Plan around the violent tail, not the average
If overall abuse is falling while physical violence and weapons hold steady, the operational priority is the small number of incidents that escalate. That means lone-working cover, fast escalation to a second person, and a clean evidence trail when something does happen. Averages will keep improving without touching that tail.
2. Shop theft has not turned the corner
5.5 million detected incidents and close to £400 million is not a problem that is receding, and it is the category most exposed to whether the Crime and Policing Act 2026 retail provisions are ever commenced. Plan on the assumption that the deterrent environment does not change this year.
3. Watch what the £5.5 billion is buying
Almost £5.5 billion over five years is the number that should focus a board. Some of that spend is guarding, some is physical hardening, some is technology, and very little of it is measured against outcomes per site. If you cannot say what your own prevention spend bought you last year, that is the gap to close before adding to it.