Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what estimate she has made of the cost of the different categories of crime to UK businesses.

The Government recognises that crime against businesses causes damage and disruption to those businesses as well as having a negative impact on their customers and the wider community. However, we do not routinely collect data on the costs of different types of crimes to different types of businesses. We do have assessments of the costs of crime to the retail sector provided by our partners on the National Retail Crime Steering Group. For example, the British Retail Consortium has estimated that the direct financial cost of crime to the UK retail industry was £700 million in 2016-17. It estimated that the cost of customer theft was £503 million and the cost of fraud against the sector was £155 million.