news round-up
Leading UK retailers discuss Organised Retail Crime challenges
London’s most iconic building, The Gherkin, was a fitting venue for Axis to hold an Organised Retail Crime round table and lunch. Fifteen leading retailers joined Axis, the Metropolitan Police and National Business Crime Solution (NBCS) to discuss the challenges being faced by retailers and how to develop ways of working that improve best practice. Crime intelligence, response and resistance to what has now become a £250 million problem (BRC 2016) were the key areas for debate. Organised crime now accounts for over 40% of all retail crime lifting the average value of loss per incident significantly.
Georgie Barnard leads the Business Crime Hub for the Metropolitan police and set out some of the opportunities for businesses and the police to improve their partnership and collaborate to support the fight to reduce the growth in organised criminality. Improving the consistency of intelligence and trend reporting to support improvements in police response and policy and procedure was a popular topic and stimulated some really constructive discussion.
Catherine Bowen from the National Business Crime Solution presented some of the progress that had been made in creating a central repository for crime reporting. The NBCS has over 45 national business members and as Catherine explained, “I think everyone recognises that the better intelligence we have, the better we can intervene, often in real-time, to prevent and detect crime. We have had great support from the police, notably Chief Constable Sue Fish, the National lead for Business Crime who is supported by Georgie Barnard from the MPS, and we can definitely work together to prosecute offenders and share good practice to improve our resistance to crime.”
The group went away from the venue with some agreed actions. Amongst them was a commitment to create a best practice around classifying and reporting incidents so that offence types, methods and offenders were more easily recognised and information could be shared in real-time, an area where the NBCS has already had some success. Georgie Barnard was keen to point out that the better aligned the police were in their thinking and terminology the easier it would be to agree common goals and make a real impact.
Andy Martin, Retail Business Development Manager with Axis hosted the event, “It became really clear that the solutions that will best work for retailers will have greater success if there is better coordination between retailers and third party stakeholders. There is some excellent technology out there to detect, deter and prevent crime, but it is important that retailers, police and crime reduction partnerships work together to maximise the benefits”.
The group is set to meet again in February and as news of the event spread, a number of retailers and interested parties registered their interest in attending the follow-up meeting.
To register your interest in attending the next meeting, contact Andy Martin at Axis via email at andy.martin@axis.com
