Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what estimate she has made of the cost of retail crime to (a) businesses, (b) local authorities and (c) the police in each of the last five years.

The Home Office runs an annual Commercial Victimisation Survey (CVS) which asks business premises in different industry sectors about their experience of various crime types in the latest year. In order to keep the length of the survey, and hence the burden on respondents, to a minimum, businesses are only asked about the cost of the latest incident of each crime type experienced in the year. Therefore, it is not possible to provide an aggregate cost of overall crime to businesses in the retail sector.

The Government recognises that retail crime has a direct cost to the businesses affected, as well as wider costs to the community and consumers. The Government maintains an ongoing dialogue with the sector, the police and other partners through the National Retail Crime Steering Group, to understand the nature of these crimes and what more can be done to tackle them.

The Home Office does not collect data on the cost of retail crime to local authorities or to the police.