New Theft and Sentencing Guidelines

The Home office have recently published 16 news updates on Crime and Policing. Amongst them, item 12 outlines how guidelines on theft and how offenders should be sentenced will be changed early next year. This is the first time that there will be a standardised approach to sentencing that judges will follow. Depending on the level of the theft, judges will have a range of guidelines to choose from in order to decide the sentence for the offender.

These changes are timely given the scale of the problem, not least the losses attributable. For example, a report by Checkpoint Systems shows that shoplifting is costing retailers up to £800 million a year.

At Perpetuity we have done a lot of research with offenders to understand theft. We also work with retailers, conducting penetration tests (mystery shoplifting) whereby we test out the effectiveness of security (by adopting a thief’s perspective) and obtain very specific and first hand feedback about why something worked or did not work.

To read more about our penetration tests and mystery shoplifting, please click here.

For more information on our work on theft, please click here.