Few stories have made me so angry recently as the case of Walker Smith.

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A long-standing employee of Waitrose, the 54-year-old has been sacked for confronting a shoplifter who was attempting to steal a bag of Easter eggs, leading to a brief struggle before the thief fled. Mr Smith, who says he regrets his actions, said he’d been spurred to intervene by watching thefts at the store “every hour of every day for the last five years” and not being allowed to do anything. He is not alone in his frustration.

According to the Office for National Statistics, shoplifting is now at the highest level since records began, with 530,643 reported offences in the year to March 2025. The true figure is almost certainly much higher, given that many shopkeepers have seemingly decided there’s no point in notifying the police. On my LBC show on Saturday, I received a call from Ramjit, who runs a shop in New Cross in south-east London. He told me shoplifting happens every single day, with the culprits becoming increasingly brazen.

There is sometimes a misconception that shoplifting is a ‘victimless crime’. Ramjit’s story underlines how it isn’t. Not only is he losing money because of rampant theft, he also fears for the safety of his staff. As a result, he’s now abandoned plans to open a new store in Lewisham because, to use his exact words, “I just can’t take it anymore, I’ve had enough”. Who on earth can blame him?

For too long, the authorities have turned a blind eye to shoplifting. When the law was changed in 2014 to make shoplifting offences valued at under £200 a summary-only offence, it effectively gave criminals a green light to plunder the high street. Thankfully, the Labour government has recently scrapped that threshold, but there remains confusion about how seriously the police are prepared to enforce it. The Met commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, recently said that it’s up to retailers to do more, and yet Mr Smith’s thanks for tackling a thief was a P45.

Waitrose says the “safety and security” of its workers and customers is the reason it discourages actions like those of Mr Smith. They also claim the reporting of his case does not cover the “full facts of the situation”. But even if his intervention was a technical breach of company policy, Waitrose bosses should have used their common sense and kept him on. The Shadow Home, Chris Philp, has written to the supermarket chain’s Managing Director, Tom Denyard, calling for Mr Smith to be reinstated and given a bonus. It’s hard not to disagree.

Ironically, the store in which the incident occurred was at Clapham Junction, only a short distance from the scene of last week’s disorder on Clapham High Street, where hordes of teenagers ran riot in a social media-fuelled ‘link-up’. Since then, an executive at Marks & Spencer, whose Clapham branch was among the stores targeted, has written to both the Home Secretary and the Mayor of London, calling on the authorities to come clean on the “true scale and impact” of shoplifting.

Thinus Keane, Marks & Spencer's retail director, says some staff have been headbutted and taken to hospital, saying “I keep hearing crime is falling, especially in London - something none of us believes, and very few people working in retail would see. Without a government seriously cracking down on crime and a mayor that prioritises effective policing, we are powerless.” He’s not the only retail boss at the end of his tether. Iceland’s executive chairman Richard Walker, who’s also the government’s cost of living tsar, says security guards in shops should carry pepper spray and truncheons to tackle rising retail crime.

Shoplifting offences won’t come down until the authorities start treating them more seriously. The people who should be punished are the criminals themselves - not those who stand up to them like Mr Smith. It’s time to stop treating it as a victimless crime and start making our high streets safe again.

Listen to James Hanson on LBC on weekends between 4 and 7am.

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