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On Monday, Prime Minister Keir Starmer stood before the USDAW shop workers’ union and declared an end to the shoplifting “free-for-all.” It was the kind of speech that plays well in a headline cycle: tough, purposeful, protective of honest working people against those who “cheat the system.” The government announced stiffer penalties for shoplifters, 3,000 additional neighbourhood police officers, a £5 million specialist intelligence unit targeting retail crime gangs, and a new standalone offence for assaulting a shop worker.
The statistics underpinning the announcement were, at best, modest. According to the Office for National Statistics, shoplifting offences fell from 516,611 in 2024 to 509,566 in 2025 (a reduction of roughly 1.4%). Starmer acknowledged the figure was “only slightly down” before adding, hopefully, that “the tide could be turning.”
It could be. But the more important question, one the speech carefully avoided, is what is driving the tide in the first place.
The enforcement apparatus is directed downward, at the poor and the visible, while remaining conspicuously inactive upward, toward concentrated wealth and elite criminality.
The economics beneath the crime
The cost-of-living crisis that began accelerating in 2020 and was made acutely worse by the conflict in the Middle East and its effect on energy markets has fundamentally altered the economic landscape for millions of British households. Food inflation, energy costs, and stagnant real wages have created conditions in which basic affordability (of warmth, of food, of housing) is no longer assured for a substantial portion of the population.
Against this backdrop, reducing shoplifting purely to a moral or criminal justice problem is a convenient fiction. The Centre for Social Justice, in research released to coincide with Starmer’s speech, noted that 67% of shoplifting offenders reoffend within 12 months, up from 55% before the pandemic. That recidivism rate is not an argument for harsher sentences. It is an argument that the conditions producing the behaviour are not being addressed.
Even the organised criminal dimension of retail theft, which accounts for a significant share of losses and which the government’s new ‘Opal’ intelligence unit is designed to disrupt, is not separate from this economic reality. Criminal networks recruiting foot soldiers to carry out thefts are, in part, an employment structure for the economically desperate. Stiffer penalties directed at the most visible and most prosecutable node of that chain (the person walking out of the shop) while the organisers adapt and the economic conditions persist, is both ineffective and morally skewed.
The harder conversation, which Labour has shown little appetite for, concerns the structural failures that have produced this landscape: the chronic underfunding of public services, the persistent failure to collect taxes owed by large corporations and wealthy individuals, and the mismanagement of industrial transitions, particularly around energy, that have left working communities exposed. These are not abstract policy preferences. They are the wound. The shoplifting crackdown is the plaster.
A justice system built around property
The prioritisation of property crime in English law is not a recent phenomenon. It stretches back centuries to a legal system designed by and for the propertied classes – one in which, in the 18th century, you could be hanged for stealing a handkerchief, transported for theft of a loaf – while domestic violence was treated as a private matter between a man and his household. The law was architecturally constructed around the protection of property as the protection of social order.
That foundational bias has never been fully dismantled. It persists in sentencing frameworks, in policing priorities, and in the allocation of investigative resource. What has changed now is that the justice system now talks the language of putting victims first, but when you look at actual outcomes (sentencing, investigation rates, resource allocation) that promise is repeatedly broken in practice.
The contrast with the treatment of child sexual offences is instructive and disturbing. Sentences for child sexual crimes (particularly non-contact offences) have long been criticised as inadequate relative to the documented, lifelong harm suffered by victims. More troubling still is the pattern of non-investigation. The institutional failures exposed around child sexual exploitation in Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford and elsewhere involved not merely lenient sentencing but active de-prioritisation of victims’ concerns for years, in some cases decades.
The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, which concluded in 2022 after seven years of work, documented systemic failures across institutions including schools, churches, the armed forces, and local government. It made 20 recommendations. Government implementation has been slow and selective. Meanwhile, a retail shoplifter in 2026 faces an enhanced enforcement apparatus and escalating penalties.
The system does not reflect a coherent moral hierarchy of harm. It reflects a historical accumulation of class interest, institutional inertia, and political convenience.
The Epstein question and elite impunity
Any serious discussion of how the British state responds to sexual crime against children must eventually confront the question of elite protection. The Jeffrey Epstein network – its membership, its operations, and above all its sustained immunity from scrutiny, represents perhaps the most consequential unanswered question in contemporary Anglo-American criminal justice.
Epstein was not a secret. His associations with powerful figures in finance, politics, royalty, and the intelligence-adjacent world were known, in varying degrees of detail, to significant sections of the establishment on both sides of the Atlantic for years. The American prosecutorial response was, for a long time, extraordinary in its restraint. Most notoriously the restraint reflected in the 2008 plea agreement negotiated by then-US Attorney Alexander Acosta, which granted Epstein and unnamed co-conspirators immunity from federal prosecution in exchange for a state-level charge that resulted in 13 months of highly permissive detention.
The UK’s engagement with questions arising from the Epstein network has been similarly cautious. It is important to note, as a matter of precision, that the ongoing public and media focus on figures such as Prince Andrew and Peter Mandelson is not straightforwardly an investigation into child sexual exploitation – the legal and factual questions are specific and contested. But the broader question of why the network functioned as it did, who provided protection and why, and what the relationship was between Epstein’s financial activities and the access he enjoyed to power, remains substantially unexamined by any public authority in this country.
The unwillingness to pursue those questions is of a piece with the structural pattern described throughout this article. Investigative resource and prosecutorial will, flow freely toward the visible and the powerless, yet contract sharply when they approach the institutional and the connected.
Investigative resources are directed away from rich criminals towards poor ones
What connects the shoplifting crackdown, the sentencing disparities in child sexual offending, the institutional failures of the Epstein investigation, and the persistent shortfall in corporate tax collection is not incompetence. It is consistency. Across different governments, different home secretaries, and different prime ministers, the same pattern recurs: enforcement flows downward; accountability does not flow upward.
HMRC’s budget was reduced during the years of most significant growth in corporate tax avoidance. The National Crime Agency’s resources for investigating elite financial crime remain a fraction of what is directed at street-level disorder. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse’s recommendations sit largely unimplemented. The Epstein network’s UK connections remain publicly unaccounted for.
And on Monday, the Prime Minister announced a crackdown on shoplifting.
None of this is to dismiss the real harm caused by retail crime, to shop workers facing abuse and assault, to communities whose high streets are degraded by it, to the businesses that absorb the losses. Those harms are genuine and deserve a response. But a response that treats shoplifting as the primary justice challenge of this moment, while the structural conditions producing it go unaddressed and elite impunity goes unchallenged, is not a justice policy. It is a performance of one.
A government serious about justice as a coherent moral project would be asking why corporate tax enforcement was cut during the years of greatest avoidance growth. It is not asking that question.
What a Serious Response Would Look Like
A serious approach to the interlinked crises described here would require several things that the current political settlement makes difficult.
It would require an honest account of the relationship between economic deprivation and crime, one that treats addressing poverty as a crime-reduction strategy, not as a separate and optional policy agenda. It would require a genuine commitment to progressive taxation and to adequately resourcing HMRC to collect what is owed, rather than pursuing marginal adjustments while large-scale avoidance continues.
It would require a Sentencing Council willing to align the severity of penalties with the severity of harm which would mean, among other things, treating offences against children with the seriousness that offences against property currently receive. It would require a National Crime Agency with the resources and political backing to investigate elite criminality without being pulled up short when that investigation approaches inconvenient institutions or individuals.
And it would require a political class willing to account, publicly and fully, for what is known about the Epstein network’s operations and associations in this country, not as a matter of prurience, but as a matter of basic democratic accountability for how power has been exercised and protected.
None of these things are technically impossible. They are politically costly. And in their absence, the annual shoplifting crackdown announcement serves a function: it creates the impression of a state that is acting, protecting, and enforcing, while the deeper questions go unasked and the deeper wounds go untreated.
The tide, Sir Keir, may or may not be turning on shoplifting. But until it turns on the conditions that produce it, and on the impunity that protects those who have far more to answer for, we are looking at the wrong water….
Statistics cited are from ONS Crime in England and Wales data (2025); Centre for Social Justice retail crime research (April 2026); Usdaw Annual Survey of Retail Workers (2025); Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse Final Report (2022).
