Cost of living crisis in Crawley: Crawley BID helps local retailers fight back against shoplifters

To help local businesses, Crawley BID is focussing on reducing petty crime in the town’s popular retail spots.

Crawley BID manager, Wendy Bell said: “The business improvement district in Crawley town centre is dedicated to helping our businesses in many ways however one of our primary focus areas is reducing the amount of petty crime that all towns are victims of.

“We have had significant success in reducing stock loss and have recorded nearly £20,000 worth of stock recovered and returned to our retailers, in just four months.

“We continue to work closely with Sussex Police to support their endeavours to make Crawley a safer town and our efforts are paying off.”

The British Retail Consortium wrote in an open letter to Sussex Police and Crime Commissioner, expressing their ‘concern for rising reports of violence, abuse and anti-social behaviour partly linked to shoplifting’.

In response to the letter, the Association of Police & Crime Commissioners Lead for Business and Retail Crime, Katy Bourne (Sussex PCC) said: “I would like to reassure all retail workers that their concerns are taken very seriously. Across England and Wales, retail crime has been identified by the overwhelming majority of PCCs as a key priority locally, with an action plan in place to tackle the rise in reported crimes.

“Shoplifting and shrinkage is not the acceptable price of working in retail and should not have to be tolerated. Similarly, being subject to foul language, threats or abuse should not be normalised because we know the devastating impact this can have on staff, their livelihoods and the supply chain.

“One of the key problems when it comes to retail crime is that only a small percentage of these crimes are currently being reported to the police. Efforts must be made to understand the full extent of the problem so that we can effectively support businesses and ensure that police forces are responding and prioritising accordingly.

“To counter this issue in Sussex, we have introduced a ‘One Touch Reporting’ system, working with the Co-op and National Business Crime Solution. This pilot scheme has significantly reduced the reporting time for crimes in retail and improved the confidence of participating stores and their staff. Reporting levels in those participating stores have increased by as much as 300%.

“I have also established the Safer Sussex Business Partnership made up of businesses from the local area who, working with our specialist Business Crime Team of nine investigators, help to identify challenges and crime patterns, develop ways to share intelligence and combat prolific offending. In addition, we have developed three programmes to work with first-time and serial offenders in order to reduce reoffending and support victims of business crime.”

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Katy Bourne OBE was re-elected by the public in May 2021 to hold the Chief Constable of Sussex Police to account for the performance of the police force, effectively making the police answerable to the communities they serve.