Shoplifting rates are soaring. Every week the news carries a new article about how common shoplifting has become. What’s behind it? Why do people steal food? Turns out it is for the obvious reason.
People need to eat and food is really expensive these days. Food inflation peaked at around 19% in early 2023. Your £100 weekly shop became £119 in a single year. It has slowed since, but slowed is not the same as stopping, let alone reversing. Meaning we are now paying £140 for what was £100 of groceries.
According to the House of Commons Library, the proportion of people in food insecure households rose from 7% in 2021/22 to 11% in 2022/23 and 2023/24. That’s a large jump, and it coincides with the rise in shoplifting.
Wages and energy prices
Food prices rising with inflation is fine if matched by wage increases. But wages have not kept pace. They’re up around 28-30%. So, at best, we either have to pay 10 percentage points more for our food, or simply do with 8% less food.
Some might argue that this is a cost that household budgets simply have to absorb.
But household budgets are already stretched beyond belief. Over that same time period, energy prices are up around 70%. What was £100 a month for energy, is now around £170 per month.
This is hard enough if you live in a house with a gas supply. Many new apartments are electric only. We were paying around £250 per month for electricity in an energy-efficient new build in 2022.
When households are forced to choose between heating and eating, nobody should be surprised if there is a rise in shoplifting.
What about the criminal gangs?
A common response is for critics to say “it isn’t people stealing to feed themselves, it is organised criminal gangs.”
To an extent, this is true. But it gets you nowhere.
First, criminal gangs target things that are lucrative. They’re now stealing basic household food. That alone tells us that food is too expensive these days.
Second, this type of organised crime does not happen in a vacuum. It only happens because there is a market for it. They need shops that will fence the stuff. They need buyers who don’t ask questions and will take the cheapest price. And that’s what happens when nobody, shops or customers, can afford to buy food.
Aren’t they just stealing chocolate and alcohol?
No. People are stealing meat, cheese, petrol, and many other everyday items.
Dismissing chocolate and alcohol as luxury goods is also too simplistic. Dubner & Levitt suggest that refined sugar fulfils every criterion for an addictive drug. Alcohol is also a drug. So at best, this comes down to an argument of why we, as a society, have allowed addiction to run rampant.
Don’t we just need more policing?
Policing cannot reduce hunger. Like the war on drugs, we can only tackle this problem by reducing demand. While people cannot afford food, there is going to be a market for criminals to exploit.
This does represent a lack of investment by the government though.
We know that crime is strongly positively correlated with poverty. When we underfund education, social services, public transport, we end up with more poverty and more crime.
What can we do, then?
There is sometimes a resigned sigh here of critics saying “well, food is just more expensive now”. And that’s true. But we’re the 5th richest country in the world, so there is no lack of money to buy bread.
The problem is how that wealth is distributed.
The richest 50 families in the UK hold more wealth than half of the population. Data from the Equality Trust shows that the poorest 10% pay an average of 48% tax, whereas the richest 10% pay just 38%. This happens through things like council tax and VAT, that hit the poorest the hardest.
And these figures are based on income, ignoring the fact that the rich typically have wealth, rather than income, and wealth is lightly taxed.
The solution is three-fold, then.
First, make sure incomes cover the basics. When prices rose, support for the poorest lagged behind. In April 2022, benefits went up by 3.1% while inflation was running at around 9%, and that gap was never made up. Benefits and the minimum wage should keep pace with the cost of essentials such as food, rent and energy, and they should rise when prices rise, not a year later.
Second, bring down the cost of essentials. Food is only one part of the squeeze. We can build social housing so that rent doesn’t eat up a whole wage. We can insulate homes so people need less energy to keep warm, and introduce a social tariff so that those on the lowest incomes pay less for it.
Third, pay for it fairly. A nurse pays income tax and National Insurance on every pound she earns above her personal allowance. Someone who makes their money from investments often pays a lower rate on the same amount. If we taxed wealth like we tax work, we could easily afford to make sure nobody has to choose between heating and eating.
And in the longer term, we should help everyone who can work to do so, through free education, affordable childcare, public transport, and reasonable adjustments so that people are not disabled by the barriers around them.
And everyone lived happily ever after
Shoplifting makes everyone’s lives worse.
Business owners are worried about being victims. Shoplifters themselves are worried about getting caught. It makes goods more expensive for the rest of us. Nobody wants this.
But shoplifting is an inevitable result of a deeply unfair society. We’re not talking about the latest iPhone or designer trainers here: if people cannot afford to buy basic commodities of life, shoplifting will continue to get worse. More policing does little to address this because people still need food.
The only solution is to make life affordable for ordinary people again.