If you have read that assaulting a shop worker is now a separate criminal offence in England and Wales, you have read something that is not yet true. It is going to be. Parliament passed it. But as at 14 August 2026 the provision has not been switched on, and a good deal of trade coverage and vendor marketing says otherwise. Because that distinction changes what you can expect from the police today, it is worth being precise about.
What has commenced and what has not
The Crime and Policing Act 2026 (c.20) received Royal Assent on 29 April 2026. UK Acts do not all come into force on that date. Most provisions wait for commencement regulations, and this Act is no exception. The first set, the Crime and Policing Act 2026 (Commencement No.1 and Saving Provision) Regulations 2026 (SI 2026/689), brought a range of provisions into force on 29 June 2026, covering anti-social behaviour, firearms, protest offences, police powers and youth diversion orders. The retail crime provisions were not among them.
- Section 45, assault of a retail worker: not in force. legislation.gov.uk records 'S. 45 not in force at Royal Assent, see s. 255(1)' and marks the provision prospective.
- Section 46, duty to make a criminal behaviour order on conviction under section 45 (inserting section 331A of the Sentencing Code): not in force, same commencement note, also marked prospective.
- Section 47, repeal of section 22A of the Magistrates' Courts Act 1980, the provision that made shop theft of goods worth £200 or less a summary-only offence: not in force, same commencement note, also marked prospective.
What this means for you today
Practically, an assault on a colleague is still charged as it was before: common assault, ABH, or a more serious offence depending on the facts, with the fact that the victim was serving the public treated as an aggravating factor at sentencing. That route has always been available and it still is. What section 45 will add is a distinct offence with its own label and its own record, which matters for signalling and for repeat offenders, and what section 46 will add is a duty on the court to consider a criminal behaviour order alongside it.
For low-value shop theft, section 22A of the 1980 Act is still on the statute book until section 47 commences. It has been widely blamed for creating an impression that theft under £200 would not be pursued. That impression outlived the provision's actual legal effect, and it will outlive its repeal too, which is why what you can hand the police matters more than what the statute says.
The backdrop, with the current numbers
The direction of travel in the published data has changed, and it is worth quoting accurately rather than reaching for the older, worse figures. The BRC's Crime Report 2026, published on 24 February 2026 and covering 1 September 2024 to 31 August 2025, recorded violence and abuse against retail workers falling from around 2,000 incidents a day to around 1,600, a fall of roughly a fifth. Incidents involving physical violence were largely unchanged at about 118 a day, and around 36 a day involved a weapon.
That is real progress and the BRC has said as much. It is also still more than three times the 455 incidents a day recorded in 2019/20. A fifth off a number that quadrupled is not the end of the problem, and the weapon and physical-violence figures barely moved, which is the part that shapes how a lone worker actually feels on a late shift.
What the new offence will change for retailers
When it commences, a standalone offence does two things. It signals that an assault on a shop worker is its own crime, not a footnote to a theft. And it raises the practical importance of evidence, because an offence the police and CPS can actually charge is an offence that needs a clean, forward-ready trail behind it.
That second point is where most retailers are weakest, and it is the reason not to wait for the commencement date. A standalone offence is only as useful as the evidence that supports a charge. A blurry phone photo of a monitor does not get a charging decision. A timestamped, multi-camera, audit-logged pack does. Building that habit takes months. Commencement will take an afternoon.
Where AI on existing cameras genuinely helps with staff safety
Camera-based AI is not a guard. But on the cameras a store already has, it can do three things that bear directly on staff safety:
- Faster awareness. Restricted-zone and after-hours rules can page a manager the moment something fires, so a lone or near-lone worker is not the only person who knows an incident is unfolding.
- Lone-worker context. On a thin night shift, the system becomes the second pair of eyes, the difference between 'no one is watching' and 'the system is watching', which is as much about how staff feel as what actually happens.
- Prosecution-grade evidence. When an incident does happen, multi-camera tracking and an append-only audit log assemble a forward-ready pack automatically, instead of a manager scrubbing footage afterwards.