The chairman of John Lewis has delivered a stark warning about the state of retail crime in Britain, describing the current wave of shoplifting as the worst he has witnessed in 35 years in the industry — while firmly rejecting the growing public appetite for workers to physically confront thieves.
Writing in The Telegraph, Jason Tarry said he received “daily reports of abuse, organised criminal gangs and serious physical attacks” on John Lewis and Waitrose staff, but insisted the answer lay not in encouraging “have-a-go heroes” but in a coordinated response from retailers, law enforcement and the courts working together. “Nothing we sell is worth the safety of our workers,” he said.
His intervention comes just days after Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer suggested “the tide could be turning” on shoplifting, following a 17 per cent rise in charging rates and a marginal one per cent fall in incidents. Tarry’s assessment is considerably less optimistic. Annual shoplifting offences in England and Wales exceeded 500,000 for the first time last year — a figure retailers believe still dramatically understates the true scale of the problem.
The timing of Tarry’s comments is pointed. They follow intense public debate over the sacking of Walker Smith, a Waitrose employee of 17 years at the Clapham Junction branch, who was dismissed after confronting a shoplifter attempting to steal Easter eggs. Waitrose said he had breached rules designed to protect staff from “serious danger to life.” The case drew widespread sympathy, with Lord Walker — Iceland’s chairman and Labour’s cost of living tsar — publicly offering Smith a job at the frozen food chain and calling for security guards to be equipped with truncheons and pepper spray following a separate incident involving a gang invading a Marks & Spencer store.
Tarry pushed back against the perception that retailers were passive in the face of theft. John Lewis security staff will challenge shoplifters, he said, “but only if they’ve been trained and it’s safe to do so.” The cost of safeguarding measures — guards, tagging, physical barriers, CCTV and body cameras — already ran into “many millions,” he said, money diverted away from lower prices, staff investment and store improvements. In the employee-owned partnership, he noted, staff were “literally watching their profits being stolen.”
The Security Industry Federation has separately advised its members not to physically intervene, telling security guards: “Do not put yourselves in harm’s way for those who may not support you afterwards” — a position that runs directly counter to what some politicians and commentators have been calling for.
Tarry welcomed two recent legislative changes — the passing of the Crime and Policing Act, which introduces a standalone criminal offence for assaulting a retail worker in England and Wales, and the abolition of the £200 threshold that had been treating lower-value thefts as a lesser category of offence. Both moves were long overdue, he said, but stressed that legislation alone was insufficient without consistent enforcement. Courts needed “to more consistently use the sentencing tools available to them,” he said, including greater deployment of Criminal Behaviour Orders as a rehabilitation tool for repeat offenders.
On technology, Tarry signalled that shoppers should expect an expansion of intrusive security measures. John Lewis is “considering the benefits of facial recognition technology” and already shares CCTV and body camera footage with multiple police forces, including the Metropolitan Police, to build intelligence profiles of prolific offenders. He argued that as systems become more sophisticated — targeting known offenders while filtering out innocent bystanders — public concerns about privacy could be addressed.
Tarry’s broader message was directed squarely at law enforcement and the courts: retailers had invested heavily, had welcomed new legislation and were ready to share intelligence, but the system as a whole was not yet doing enough. “A bolder, collective approach” was the only way forward, he said, adding that John Lewis would continue hosting police surgeries in its shops and providing officers with free drinks and subsidised meals in its canteens to strengthen working relationships on the ground.
