PRA chief executive Gordon Balmer believes a meeting with a group that links police and businesses to tackle crime will help to move the issue of fuel and other forecourt theft up the agenda.
Balmer held talks last week with the Patrick Holdaway, a superintendent with the City of London police, who heads the National Business Crime Centre. Holdaway is driving a review of the NBCC’s Retail Crime Strategic Plan, which aims to set minimum standards and provide improvements across the reporting of crime and intelligence, as well as dealing with vulnerable staff who have faced difficult incidents.
Retail crime has been “spiralling out of control”, according to the British Retail Consortium’s latest annual survey, which showed that losses through theft had reached a record £2.2 billion in 2023/24. Violence and abuse against shopworkers also rose by 50%, with more than 2,000 incidents on average per day.
Separate figures from the Office of National Statistics published on January 30 revealed shoplifting offences reported by police in England and Wales rose by 23% to more than 492,000 over the same period: the highest figure since its recording of incidents began in 2003.
The PRA has been advocating for a ”streamlined process” of recovering losses from fuel theft, making it easier for the industry to access offenders’ electronic data, and says it is optimistic that its members could start benefiting from this during the current quarter.
It says it made a breakthrough in this area last year, following discussions with former Secretary of State for Transport Mark Harper, and subsequent advice from the Home Office.
The PRA says that companies which provide a service to recover monies associated with drive-offs and no means to pay will soon have online access to the DVLA database, provided they meet certain criteria outlined by the police.
