As featured in Across Magazine, small number of repeat offenders are driving the shop theft crisis, and shopping centre owners have a critical role to play in prevention and mitigation, shows Workman data

Retail crime in the UK is at a 20-year high. According to the British Retail Consortium’s annual survey for 2025, incidents of customer theft rose by 3.7 million in a single year to reach 20.4 million: a £2bn cost to retailers. Violence and abuse against shopworkers rose 50%, with more than 2,000 incidents recorded per day.

But behind these headline numbers lies a more specific narrative; one that points directly at where intervention can make the greatest difference.

Survey data gathered by Workman across 20 of our 100+ managed shopping centres reveals a pattern that is consistent and striking: the vast majority of theft activity is driven by a small number of known, repeat offenders.

• 60% of centres: prolific offenders account for more than half of all incidents.
• 75% of centres have more than 10 known individuals under active monitoring.
• 40% of centres track more than 20 prolific offenders.
• 100% at one centre, known offenders account for all recorded incidents.

This is no longer a story of opportunistic shoplifting primarily driven by cost-of-living pressures. Centre managers across the Workman-managed portfolio report a hardening pattern: organised crime groups, and a small cohort of locally known repeat offenders who return because consequences remain limited. At some centres, the same faces appear daily.

Shopping centre owners and their management teams play a unique role in this landscape. Unlike individual retailers, who see only what happens within their own four walls, a centre manager has visibility across an entire ecosystem: dozens of occupiers, thousands of daily footfall interactions, and a direct line to local police, BIDs, and town centre partnerships.

That intelligence role is increasingly formalised. Every centre in the Workman survey employs its own security staff. Four in five run a Shopwatch walkie-talkie scheme; one in five also operates a WhatsApp group for real-time information sharing between retailers. A quarter host pop-up police stations at peak times; a fifth have a permanent police presence on site. Several are members of formal business crime reduction partnerships, using the Disc app or similar apps to share offender information in a data-compliant way between retailers, schools, BIDs, and police.

This coordination function, aggregating incident data, identifying patterns, maintaining banning lists, liaising with police to build prosecution cases, is becoming as important as physical security.

One Workman centre manager puts it plainly: “The Centre reports incidents, but it is frustrating that the occupiers do not report to the police, thus showing poor figures that don’t help the police.” Better coordination between the centre and its occupiers directly affects the quality of evidence available to secure convictions.

There is a balance to strike. Centre managers are acutely aware that visible security must not tip into an environment that makes customers feel surveilled or unwelcome. Shopping centres succeed because they are inviting, accessible, and experiential — heavy-handed security works against that. The most effective interventions are those that are targeted, intelligence-led, and largely invisible to the majority of shoppers who have no involvement in crime.

The goal is to be a safe place, not a fortified one. That means concentrating resources on the small number of known individuals who cause disproportionate harm, rather than treating all visitors as suspects. It also means being selective about the technologies deployed and how they are communicated; facial recognition, for example, is most effective and most publicly acceptable when it operates on a specific banning list, discards data on non-flagged individuals immediately, and is clearly signed.

The single most requested technology across the survey is facial recognition. More than a third of centre managers identified it as the measure they most want to see deployed, not as a surveillance tool, but as a means of flagging known banned individuals within seconds of their entry onto the scheme.

A facial recognition trial is already underway at one Workman-managed shopping centre, funded through the local BID. The system flags individuals who appear on a banning list and alerts security within 60 seconds of entry. Data on non-flagged individuals is discarded immediately. Workman has cleared the technology through its own compliance process.

Separately, a newly developed incident reporting app allows occupiers to report incidents in under 60 seconds, building a real-time evidence base that security teams can use to identify theft hotspots, adjust patrol patterns, and support police engagement.

Our data suggests a clear hierarchy of intervention, with own security staff and Shopwatch walkie-talkie schemes at the baseline – these are near-universal and effective for rapid response. The gap in WhatsApp adoption (only 20% of centres use it) suggests a straightforward quick win for real-time information sharing with retailers who may be less willing to engage through formal channels. Incident-reporting apps such as Protect or the Disc app represent the next step; moving from reactive response to proactive pattern identification, and generating the data that police need to build cases against repeat offenders.

For higher-footfall or higher-risk schemes, facial recognition is moving from pilot stages to practical consideration. The technology has matured, compliance pathways exist, and the business case (preventing a known offender from entering the premises at all) is simple.

Above all, the evidence points to increased coordination as the multiplier. One centre alone cannot resolve the problem. But a network of centres, BIDs, retailers and police sharing real-time intelligence, acting on the same data, and presenting a consistent front against a relatively small number of prolific offenders – that changes the equation significantly.

Of course, shop theft is not an issue any single party can tackle alone. When centre managers, landlords, occupiers, asset managers, BIDs, police and the wider local community work together, sharing intelligence, coordinating their response and presenting a consistent front, the results are transformative. Shopping centres are at their best when they are safe, welcoming and vibrant places to be. Our goal is always to operate the kind of destinations people choose to visit, return to, and spend time in.

The shop theft crisis is real and worsening. But so is the sophistication of the response available to those who manage the spaces where it happens.