Shoplifters to get ankle tags to keep them off high street

Persistent thieves to be tracked and banned from stores in tough measures to fight rising crimewave

REPEAT shoplifters are to be tagged so they can be tracked and banned from high street stores under new measures to crack down on an epidemic of theft.

Persistent offenders will face “three strikes and out” where judges and magistrates will be expected to make them wear GPS tags if they are sentenced on three separate occasions.

Police and probation officers will be able to impose exclusion zones, banning repeat offenders from retail centres, and use data on their movements to link them to crimes.

Assaulting a shop worker will become a standalone criminal offence with a maximum sentence of six months in jail and/or an unlimited fine.

Offenders will also be placed under criminal behaviour orders, barring them from specific shops or premises, with a prison sentence of up to five years if they breach them.

Special police units with mobile facial recognition cameras will be deployed to city and town centres to help track down criminals wanted by the police including repeat shoplifters.

The measures come as shoplifting offences have risen by more than 30 per cent to a record 1,300 a day, topping 400,000 in a year for the first time.

The British Retail Consortium (BRC) has reported a doubling in losses from thefts to £1.8 billion and an increase in incidents of violence or abuse of shop workers from 870 to 1,300 a day.

Rishi Sunak said: “I am sending a message to those criminals whether serious organised criminal gangs, repeat offenders or opportunistic thieves who think they can get away with stealing from these local businesses or abusing shopworkers, that enough is enough.”

In an exclusive article for The Telegraph online, Chris Philp, the policing minister, said the Government wants a “zero tolerance approach” to shoplifting. “Let’s not forget the perpetrators of shoplifting are not Dickensian victims ... they are often serial offenders – and they come from all walks of life,” he said.

The decision to tag shoplifters mirrors a similar requirement for burglars, where courts have enforced tagging as a condition of their licence so they can be tracked every minute of the day.

Any breach of the tagging order would see the shoplifter returned to court for a breach of their licence which could include a jail sentence if it had been originally suspended.

Ministers had previously resisted calls for a specific offence of assaulting a shop worker, arguing that it was already an aggravating factor in an offence of ABH. The decision to go ahead with it brings the Tories in line with Labour which committed to such a move as long ago as 2015. The new offence had also been demanded by retailers and shopworkers’ unions.

As with shoplifters, there would be a presumption for courts that any offender found guilty of assaulting staff three times would be required to wear a tag as part of any punishment.

As part of a £55.5million extra for police technology, £4 million has been earmarked for the bespoke mobile units with facial recognition technology to identify criminals wanted by police including repeat shoplifters.