The £70m Bicester town centre regeneration scheme has been given the green light by Cherwell District Council, with construction scheduled to start later this year.

thecentre:mk, Milton Keynes' regional shopping centre, has topped off a string of prominant signings by filling its new restaurant quarter: Destination Dining.

Discount clothing chain Ethel Austin and its sister firm Au Naturale went into administration today, putting over 3,700 jobs at risk.

The Government released its long-awaited revisions to the Planning Policy Statement 4 (PPS4) planning guidance note between Christmas and the New Year, traditionally seen by civil servants as a time to bury bad news. But far from proving controversial, the new guidance has been broadly welcomed.
Firstly, the new guidance note – subtitled Planning for Sustainable Economic Growth – is simpler, running to just 32 pages against the previous 137. But in policy terms it reinforces the long-established preference for town centre development over out-of-town.
According to Housing and Planning Minister John Healey, it ties planning and economic development policies closer together in order to support sustainable economic growth while  protecting local markets and small shops.
The revised guidelines keep the existing ‘sequential test’ for town planners, which requires the most central town centre sites to be developed first, with edge-of-town seen as the next best option and out-of-town sites seen as a last resort. Under the test, an out-of-town site can only be developed if the applicants can prove that no suitable sites exist in-town..
But in addition to this, a tougher ‘impact test’ is also being introduced. This will replace the existing ‘needs test’, which the Government described as ‘dysfunctional’ because it could unintentionally stifle diversity and consumer choice in town. In some cases, new shops in town centres were ruled out because out-of-town stores, especially supermarkets, already provided that function.

protection
The change to an ‘impact test’ is designed to strengthen local authorities’ case in resisting new developments that threaten existing town centres on economic, social and environmental grounds.  It will test whether impact is positive or negative on climate change, town centre consumer choice and retail diversity, investment and town centre trade and gives councils powers to cap the size of new retail developments where this is justified.
However one widely-expected change does not appear in the new PPS4, and that is the competition test for supermarkets. As recently as October 2009 a Competition Commission investigation into the UK grocery market called for the test which would  require local authorities to assess planning applications for new grocery floorspace over 1,000 sq m for their impacts on competition, in consultation with the Office of Fair Trading.
The Government says it will formally respond to the Commission’s recommendations, including the competition test proposal shortly, but it claims the new PPS4 provides strong protection for town centres and will reassure town centre managers and independent retailers up and down the country.
Introducing the new policy, Healey said: “As the country moves towards economic recovery, the Government is putting in place new protections for local shops at the heart of communities as many high streets have been hit hard by a double whammy of the downturn and out-of-town retail parks.
“By strengthening the hand of local councils, we are giving them the expert tools they need to put the viability and vitality of town centres first in difficult market conditions. The new tools go further than ever before to protect town centres from the harm large out-of-town developments can have.”
Planning experts said the new policy is unlikely to make a substantial contribution to economic growth, but they conceded that it is likely to help smaller, independent retailers.
Mark Dodds, a partner at planning consultancy DPP, said: “The publication of PPS4 is very welcome and there are some very sensible changes, such as the removal of the needs test.
“However it is our opinion that it will do little to achieve the Government’s aims of stimulating sustainable economic development in any meaningful way.  Larger and multiple retailers will, if anything, find it harder to push proposed developments past committed local councillors, particularly for small format retailing in local centres or rural areas.”

confusion
But Dodds, who advises Tesco among others, also says PPS4 is riddled with errors that developers and local authorities will undoubtedly find confusing and frustrating. “We have noticed a number of errors in the guidance accompanying PPS4,” he said, “most notably an annex that states that PPS4 cancels provisions in PPS7, relating to major developments in areas of outstanding natural beauty.  The Department of Communities and Local Government has since confirmed that this is not the case.”
And he warned that while PPS4 may be a consolidation of policy relating to economic development and town centres, it will not simplify the process of getting planning consent.  
“Developers will be well advised to make representations to the local development framework process as new limits and thresholds are set for retail development,” said Dodds.  “They may also wish to influence assessments of need and capacity that are now set only at strategic level.  Impact assessments will as a result become more complex.”
And David Jones, director at the planning division of Evans Jones, warned that the new policy could add to the workload of hard-pressed local authorities. “The PPS requires local authorities to maintain up-to-date survey data to assist in the identification of economic and property challenges to be considered in plan making, review and development control decisions,” he said. “The requirement for local authorities to prepare and subsequently maintain the survey data will place greater strain upon already stretched planning departments.”
According to Jones the Government clearly wishes to strengthen local authorities’ armoury to enable them to resist inappropriate out-of-town developments. But he cautioned: “The effectiveness of polices of restraint may be questionable in cases where local authorities fail to either collate or subsequently maintain accurate and robust data upon existing retail centres.
And he concluded: “Time will tell whether in the current climate the PPS will actually have any discernable impact. While retailing remains depressed and many town centre retail outlets remain vacant local authorities will seek to protect and improve the viability of existing centres. However, if local authorities fail to collect appropriate data, then it could prove difficult for them to defend appeals for new out-of-town retailing.

As recession-struck centres focus on commercialisation to support them through 2010, families – or more specifically children – are often a target audience. A single person might spend half an hour looking around the shops; families, on the other hand, come to the mall for a day out. Children play on the rides or meet their favourite cartoon characters while parents take a look around the shops, and afterwards they might all sit down for a meal.
No wonder, then, that centre managers are still keen to invest in children’s entertainment. Patrick Tranter from Rainbow Productions, a company providing shopping centres with licensed children’s characters, says that interest has far from fallen.
“Christmas was as busy as ever, and Easter was up on the year before,” he notes.
So why the high levels of interest in character appearances? “Because it’s a low cost way of bringing in footfall and boosting sales. A centre in the South East would spend £1,000
on an appearance and get 3,000 people in, not to mention promoting the centre to the right people who will continue spending money in the future.”
Licensed character appearances are comprised of ‘meet and greets’ or workshops hosted by well-known children’s characters, driving footfall and spend. Not a direct income generator, then, but according to Tranter the centre sees an impact on their figures immediately.
“A well-organized character appearance will draw at least 1,000 children into the centre with their families,” he says. Cafés on the mall see the benefit from higher footfall, and retail sales go up as families head for the shops. “It’s about bringing the right sort of people into malls: families who want to spend time in the centre and buy the related merchandise.”
When the cartoon character Ben 10 made an appearance recently, the centre manager advised toy retailers to move related products to the front of their stores. “The most successful character appearances happen when the centre manager and retailers work together,” Tranter stresses.
This type of event demonstrates the merging of commercialisation and marketing in shopping centres. Traditionally, commercialisation looks at direct income schemes like coin machines or rental revenue from RMUs. Now, there’s a trend towards hosting free entertainment that increases footfall and dwell time with a guaranteed impact on sales. And crucially, raising the overall reputation of the centre will encourage return visits and raise figures in the future.  
The interactive nature of these events has other benefits. “Postman Pat visited centres in early December to collect letters for Father Christmas from the children. The centres could then capture data using information from these letters.”
Rainbow Productions carefully advises centre management to help them get the most out of each character appearance. A properly organised and well-publicised character appearance might attract over 1,000 children, while poor organisation might draw in 500. But Tranter stresses that centres shouldn’t over-publicise or else they’ll be faced with too many people to deal with. “These children’s characters are popular for a reason. Centres that put on a successful event always book again.”
He also suggests that centres avoid publishing the exact appearance times before the event, giving families extra time in the centre. “There’s usually an appearance every half hour, but it’s good for the centre if a family turns up 20 minutes early. So we suggest that the exact times aren’t pre-advertised, but instead that signage is put up on the day to let people know what’s happening and when,” advises Tranter.
The ever-popular kiddie rides are a mainstay of children’s entertainment, providing centres with a more typical channel of direct income. But like the character appearances, rides need to boost the perception of a centre. Just as Tranter claims that different types of character are more suited to some areas than others – “Garfield would work brilliantly in Liverpool and Birmingham, but Beatrix Potter characters belong somewhere like Tunbridge Wells” – a carousel needs to fit in with the feel of the centre and its local demographic.  
Ride On Entertainment, which manufactures and supplies carousels to shopping centres, has recently launched a new design to be trialled in Westfield London this month. Craig Beswick, general manager of Ride On’s UK branch, stresses the importance of keeping up-to-date.
“Shopping centres have become more and more contemporary in their design. Nowadays they only have a smattering of RMUs, and those they do have are designed to a very high spec. So we’ve gone the same way with our carousels,” he explains.
Ride On’s standard carousel features a turntable with three popular characters for children to ride around on. The new design replaces these characters with 17-inch screens playing video clips of recent Thomas the Tank Engine episodes. Children can watch and listen to the clips as they ride around. This, according to Beswick, is the kind of innovation needed if major centres are to show an interest in children’s rides.
“Westfield London are never going to put Bob the Builder out on the floor, so we had to think totally out of the box. These rides have got to attract children and act like furniture in the malls – it can’t look out of place.
“The new design is a way of lifting the market by appealing to high end shopping centres. It’s something they can comfortably put in their malls, and it takes away the stigma of kiddie rides in centres,” argues Beswick.
Ride On’s recent innovation, as well as being up-to-date in look, is deliberately flexible enough to incorporate the children’s characters topping the popularity chart at any given time. “It takes only seconds to upload new themes, which means the ride can be instantly re-invented with the very latest characters while they are at their most popular,” says Beswick.
“It’s a great way to maximise appeal while cross-promoting exactly what your retailers are selling.”

tech savvy
A similar innovation is Primary Leisure’s Kids TV. The first of the coin-operated ‘kids pods’ launched in 2008 to deliver what Jonathan Smith, Primary Leisure’s co-founder, describes as “a complete move away from traditional kiddie rides”.
The product allows children to watch their favourite cartoons inside a kiosk for £1 a time. “Our aim is to attract kids into a very safe environment where they can select and watch cartoons,” explains Smith. And a new generation of Kids TV pods, launched last month at The O2 Centre in London, incorporates the latest in digital touchscreen technology.
“Kids eat up technology. They are like sponges, taking everything in.” In the fight to remain relevant to young people today, the new pods include LCD screens that children can touch to select one of four cartoons and their favourite episode. The options from licensor Classic Media include Postman Pat and Basil Brush, putting the age range between two and nine years. However, Smith recognises that the pods’ interactivity and digitalisation has the potential to reach an older audience.
“The experience of the pod itself is good for kids aged 10, 11 or 12. But the content isn’t,” says Smith. “We’re in talks with other licensors to include characters more suitable for a higher age, like Marvel which has Spider-man and Iron Man.”
If individual pods were branded as Marvel or Classic Media, they could be put side by side in a shopping centre to appeal to older children right through to the very young. “It effectively doubles the age range,” Smith affirms.   
But having met the childrens’ requirements, Smith has taken on an altogether more challenging audience: their parents. “Attracting the parents’ attention and drawing their interest is the real difficulty. To do this, we’ve included a screen on the outside showing an advertising loop or other information which adults can watch while their children are in the pods.”
And as a commercialisation tool, the advertising potential is vast. Not only can brands advertise on the external screen, but a voucher-printing system allows advertisers to link commercial messages on the screen with a promotional voucher that can be used by shoppers in the centre. Bluetooth technology adds another dimension, allowing advertisers to market to shoppers within a pre-defined area around the kids’ pods.
But Smith does admit one flaw: “My only criticism is that we charge £1 for children to watch the cartoons they could be watching at home.
“That’s why we want to invest more of our budget into education. The touchscreen capability means that education and gaming can be brought in. We’re talking to a number of children’s education companies to get the right media properties inside our pods.”

ride along
Another product very much in the spirit of commercialisation is the Boobaloo Kiddie Kart. Used in several centres up and down the country, the karts allow children to ride around the centre while their parents shop.
     “It’s about making the shopping experience easier for families with children,” begins Boobaloo director Robert Morris.
     “Parents can either put their kids in a ride that last for 30 seconds, or they can rent out a kart which the children can enjoy for a couple of hours. And there are baskets on the top of the karts to carry any shopping.”
Morris points out that, although spend is down, people are still looking for ways to entertain their families. So managers need to sustain footfall levels by encouraging people to spend the afternoon in their shopping centre. The karts provide a unique point of difference in this regard. “If there are two malls nearby and one has the kiddie karts, that might be the deciding factor for a family,” Morris asserts.
Echoing Smith’s vision for Kids TV, Boobaloo karts offer optimum advertising space. After realising the potential for selling space on the sides of the karts, Morris has been selecting advertisers depending on their suitability. “I’ve been able to cherry-pick children’s-based companies. The milkshake company ShakeAway advertises on karts at the Dolphin Centre in Poole,” he confirms.
There is also scope for landlords to really support their retailers through harder times. “Shopping centre managers can promise tenants advertising on the pods as part of the service charge. They can give something back to their retailers.”
However, as with any product, the success of the karts depends largely on the centre’s management. “Centres have to really want to make them work,” stresses Morris. “Kingfisher centre in Redditch are spot on. They knew exactly where the karts were going to go, and they market them on posters and on the website. But the Frenchgate centre in Doncaster was making a lot less money than Kingfisher despite having a bigger fleet. I had to go in and tell them where to place the karts.”
Morris’s theory is that smaller centres can install and operate the karts far more easily because there are fewer levels of management. With larger corporate centres, the process takes a lot longer. “It’s the nature of the beast,” he admits.

Ignoring brand names in everyday life is arguably impossible. Products such as Coca-Cola and Nintendo have become household names, instantly recognisable and comfortingly familiar. Then there are entertainment shows: X-Factor and Big Brother are a constant source of debate, at times even entering the political arena. It’s unsurprising, then, that shopping centre commercialisation is becoming more affiliated with major brands. But just how easy is it to persuade national and international companies to promote in shopping centres, and what are the benefits to the centre itself?
According to Brandspace chief executive Paul Soanes, brand promotion in malls is becoming increasingly popular. Whether companies want to market a new product or simply get the attention of passing shoppers, centre promotions are a direct and cost-effective marketing method. “Throughout 2009, we’ve seen more brands doing this kind of thing,” begins Soanes. “Traditional advertising was down 30 per cent last year but this type of experiential promotion was up by 10 per cent.”
Despite a rise in the number of promotions, the campaigns themselves have been smaller in size and value – no doubt one of the many lasting effects of 2009’s recession. But Soanes is confident that interest in centre promotions will remain high. “Experiential marketing has become more of a trend in the last five to 10 years. It’s a relatively unproven phenomenon, but the logic is that getting close to a consumer is better than advertising on TV, where you have no idea who’s watching,” Soanes insists.

INNOVATION
But while this has been the trend for the last decade or so, it’s only recently that brands have started to get more creative. In the past, companies handed out free samples; now they might attract potential customers with interactive games, free trials, and even smells. At Lakeside shopping centre, a home brand recently pumped out the smell of freshly washed laundry: something Soanes describes as ‘aroma media’.
So what does the centre get in return? To start with, a big name brand will drive footfall and dwell time as shoppers are drawn towards promotions featuring their favourite drink or game console. “It becomes a destination event for shoppers,” insists Soanes.
But an all-singing, all-dancing campaign hosted by a well-known brand is not made available to every shopping centre. Out of the 500 centres in Britain, Soanes estimates that major brands only gravitate towards the top 100. This doesn’t mean that the remainder are left with nothing, however. “There are plenty of smaller brands who want to use these centres to promote directly to shoppers,” he adds.
The most important aspect of a commercialisation strategy is, of course, the income generated. Managers have the right to be selective over the type of brand and campaign they let into the centre, stresses Soanes. “The centre remains completely in control of the output. They are opening themselves up to other companies, so they can approve or reject anything they like.”
Mark Hughes-Webb is a business development director at Space-2, which finds short-term income generators to fill under-utilised spaces. Space-2 is in fact a property consultancy, but its directive is an obvious match for the shopping centre industry. Hughes-Webb launched a separate service, BrandHub, in early 2009. BrandHub offers fixed-cost lettings for a month at a time, enabling established brands or start-up companies to open ‘pop-up’ units in shopping centres.
Focussing on short-term leases is unusual for a property consultancy, but Hughes-Webb identified a gap in the market. With the growing prominence of commercialisation and a shift towards experiential brand promotions, the need for appropriate spaces and temporary lets has grown. According to Hughes-Webb, brands want a physical presence in shopping centres in order to appeal directly to their target audience. What they don’t want is a 10- to 15-year lease.
“Brands want to try new things, not be tied into a lease for the next 10 years. But property agents aren’t instructed to do anything short-term. Now, we want to make brands aware that they can approach the property industry for this kind of interactive, short-term promotion,” asserts Hughes-Webb. “It’s not just about temporary lettings: it has become a business model.”

The right fit
Part of this model is to find the location first, before devising a suitable promotion to fit the space. “Agencies come up with good ideas, but if they can’t provide the physical space then it can’t be done. We want to do things the other way around. Find the location first, then approach the right brands with our ideas,” says Hughes-Webb. And that is exactly how BrandHub managed to get Heat magazine into The Brunswick Centre in London’s Bloomsbury.
Initially, Heat hadn’t even considered holding its promotion in a shopping centre. “They wanted to display photographs and images of celebrities used in back issues of the magazine, which could have been done in a conventional venue like an art gallery,” Hughes-Webb says. “But in a shopping centre, the appeal is that you’re targeting the right people. Heat came to the Brunswick on the basis that it is not a conventional venue, and it was chosen because it suited the brand.”
Possibly one of the most recognised and talked about brands across the country is, of course, The X-Factor. International company Photo-Me has recently come up with a product for shopping centres that involves the X-Factor brand. More impressively, the licensors have willingly signed up.
The product itself is similar to the traditional photographic booths that Photo-Me operates. But rather than taking photos, people go inside the heavily branded booths to sing along to a song of their choice. “It’s a karaoke machine,” explains Francois De Freitas, head of marketing at Photo-Me. “You choose from 500 songs, then sing along inside the booth, and a DVD of your performance is burnt for you to keep.”
At £5 a go, the new X-Factor karaoke booths aren’t the cheapest shopping centre offering. But De Freitas is certain that the brand image and the product itself are targeting the right people. “The most important thing is to create products that are attractive. They need to satisfy the needs of the customers who want to have some fun and do things they can’t do at home,” he says.
And it’s the appeal of a well-known brand that De Freitas is hoping will satisfy shoppers’ needs as they look for extra entertainment. The X-Factor was the obvious choice for this type of product, but convincing licensor FremantleMedia to associate its most prestigious brand with a karaoke booth was no mean feat. “It’s been difficult,” he admits. “Fremantle wanted to protect the brand because it’s so big. This is a very unique concept, so some people don’t know quite what to make of it. But Fremantle saw the opportunity.”
Meeting high market standards and garnering complex technology have added further delays. It has taken over a year since the project was devised to get to this point, and only a handful of shopping centres had booths installed before Christmas. The initial plan had been to roll out the product during The X-Factor’s latest series.
“We would have liked to be in centres earlier, but a lot have now become involved,” insists De Freitas. Over 80 centres including White Rose shopping centre in Leeds and Manchester Arndale, have now installed the karaoke booths, with more to follow: “We’re rolling them out first in the UK, then maybe across other countries.”
So it would seem the X-Factor brand is strong enough to churn up interest all year round, which is ideal in the context of commercialisation. “The booth has been very well-received,” says De Freitas. “Centres have been very keen to take it on because it’s something completely new to the industry.”

There’s no denying that CCTV systems are a vital part of shopping centre security. Technology improves on a yearly basis, providing clearer images and digital formatting. But CCTV, regardless of its quality, is not enough to prevent and deter crime. Centres need people feeding information from ground level if they want to root out trouble makers for good. While accredited security guards are one form of manned guarding, several centres are putting some of the responsibility into the hands of the retailers.
     When management at The Thistles Shopping Centre in Stirling reviewed their CCTV security system, things weren’t running as smoothly as hoped. The contractor, Shopsafe, was managing the radio link system remotely via civilian CCTV operators. But according to centre manager Colin Moulson, this was all a little too remote – to the point of being virtually inactive.
“This system had become more and more ineffective due to it being both poorly managed and monitored by the contractor and the civilian operators,” he explains. “Consequently, it was not creating the deterrent environment that a system of this nature should. We couldn’t move forward with it because it wasn’t good enough value for our retailers. They would contact the control room and get no answer.”
The controversy surrounding service charges has prompted management and landlords to demonstrate its value to their tenants. This was a tough call when only 30 out of The Thistles’ 95 retailers signed up to the old security system, lowering its value for the centre as a whole. “It was part of the service charge: retailers were paying for it so it should have been working. Word got round and there was little confidence in the system.”
After researching other options, Moulson and his DTZ centre management team introduced a radio scheme last February, monitored and managed in-house, which every retailer is now involved in.
“In effect it became ‘mandatory’ for our retailers to participate,” says Moulson, adding that although this sounds risky, the outcome is well worth it. “Making subscription compulsory is a risk and it did put some retailers off at first. But we wanted to be able to say to our tenants: ‘Here’s what we’re doing for you.’ It’s a very good box to tick considering the current problems. Shopping centres aren’t the cheapest place for retailers to be trading, so we wanted to show them the benefits of being here.”

networking
What separates the current system from the old is that it connects every retailer via radio link not only to the control room but to each other. Sales staff throughout the centre can listen to incoming reports from other stores and keep a lookout for people matching the descriptions.
“The impact was clear from the very first day,” says facilities manager Scott Wells. The morning after the new system went active, a team of professional thieves had been making their way around the centre’s major fashion operators.
“A message went round on the radio, and the sales team at Ernest Jones heard the descriptions and caught them walking past their store with hundreds of pounds of stolen goods,” says Wells.
And in another example, a neighbouring shopping centre had been hit with fraudulent vouchers. The security team at The Thistles passed on a description of the vouchers through the radio link, and retailers were able to recognise and refuse them.
“It would never have worked with CCTV because we wouldn’t have got a description of the vouchers, or been able to immediately pass information around to everyone,” adds Wells. “Our current system works because it involves a network of people. We still have CCTV in place but we can’t rely on it.”
A closer look at the crime figures seems to back up Wells’ claims. Between January and July 2008, staff reported 569 thefts at the centre. After launching the new system, the number of reported thefts rose to 950 in the first six months of 2009. Whether the recession has impacted on crime levels or not, this is a vast difference and most likely the result of a better security system, combining CCTV with people on the ground.
“Technology is moving at a rapid pace, but you can’t beat people communicating with each other,” asserts Moulson. “We needed to get something that we were far more in control of and the speed with which retailers and the security team react is amazing. Every retailer in the centre knows within minutes when there has been a crime.”
Retailers Against Crime (RAC) – an information sharing initiative across Scotland, Northern Ireland, North East England and Cumbria – has been involved in the Thistles Partners Against Crime project. The idea behind RAC was to build a national database enabling every shopping centre in the country to identify known criminals and professional teams. Moulson is keen for his centre’s retailer initiative to be rolled out in this way. “Retailers Against Crime has seen a lot of benefits from our scheme and is very interested in getting other centres to do something similar.”
Another pioneer in retail crime prevention, Rubie Charalambous, has been working on the multiagency initiative NBIS (National Business Information System) since it’s launch in 2008. Originally set up as a scheme for town centre managers, NBIS is now used in over 60 towns, cities and shopping centres. It has affiliates in local authorities, councils, police forces and shopping centre management.
Charalambous launched the initiative as town centre manager at Walthamstow to root out crime and anti-social behaviour in the area. Local businesses pay for the software package – a radio link system provided by Hicom – and communicate reports of crime or anti-social behaviour. Any time an offence takes place it is recorded on the system, and every subscriber can listen in to police interviews and descriptions of the criminals.
“Historical information is built up of a known offender, such as whereabouts he is operating and what he is doing at any given time. We can track these criminal because we are all connected,” explains Charalambous.

Leading the way
And at the epicentre is The Brewery in Romford, where the system is housed. “This is the first time a shopping centre has been able to take the lead and influence how security works in the town centre,” asserts Charalambous, who is currently centre manager at The Brewery and chair of NBIS. Her impetus seems to derive from experience dealing with local authorities – “councils are notoriously slow” – and wanting to capture the movements of criminals across the country.
“It’s the first model of it’s kind,” says Charalambous. “Other centres, like Bluewater, have self-contained security systems. These are great, but the difficult bit is getting centres to talk to each other. Some just aren’t interested because it means going outside the normal way of working.” But she is confident that, with The Brewery leading the way, other centres will follow on.
“The package is affiliated by Retailers Against Crime and goes through another organization, Action Against Retail Crime, so it’s completely authentic. It puts everybody in touch with everybody else.,” Charalambous continues.
“The police are not solely responsible for lowering crime levels – we all need to support each other in this. While the initial outlay is expensive, it’s nothing compared to the amount businesses might end up losing in stolen goods.”
The next challenge for Charalambous is a nationwide rollout. “Since the downturn began, we’ve seen a rise in different groups of people committing retail crime: the elderly, for example. Criminals aren’t as obvious anymore.
“But NBIS gives you a whole range of statistics that you wouldn’t get otherwise. Police collect figures on big crimes, but not crimes in retail. With information collected from people in the stores and businesses, police can check our reports alongside their own and put two and two together.”

The number of retail thefts by customers rose by a third in a single year, and violence and abuse against staff doubled, according to the British Retail Consortium.
The findings, published in the Retail Crime Survey 2009, identified significant reversals in the reduction of crime over the last five years. According to the report, there was a 10 per cent rise in the total cost of retail crime in 2008/2009 with UK shops paying £1.1bn in damages  – the equivalent of 72,000 retail jobs.  
Customer theft accounts for the biggest share of all retail crime, both by the number of incidents (94 per cent), and by monetary value (42 per cent). The survey recorded 498,405 incidents – around eight per cent higher than the five-year rolling average. However, for the first time the BRC survey also assessed the proportion of retail crimes not reported to the police. The 60 retailers that took part estimated half of all customer theft goes unreported, bringing the real level of theft into the region of 750,000 to one million incidents in one year.
The value of each theft has continued to fall, averaging at £45 a time, as retailers improve the protection of high value items. Mixed retailers, DIY and hardware stores, in particular, experienced worse than average customer theft.
Another disturbing find was the doubling of violence against retail staff compared with last year. At least 22,000 staff suffered physical or verbal attacks or threats, with the overall level of recorded incidents running at 20 per 1,000 staff members. The BRC notes that the actual figure is likely to be higher as a good deal of abuse goes unreported.
Last year’s downturn prompted over half of retailers to invest more in crime prevention and security, with an average spend per store of £13,950. Despite this extra spend, the number of burglaries was up by a third and robberies almost doubled. The research shows burglaries increased to 21 incidents per 100 outlets, reversing a five-year downward trend. But as with customer theft, the value of an individual robbery was down by 61 per cent on last year to an average cost of £2,077.
In another reversal of fortunes, criminal damage more than doubled reaching 47 incidents per 100 outlets – the equivalent to nearly half of all stores being affected – ending a nine-year drop. However, only a third of incidents were reported to the police, again highlighting a worrying discrepancy between police recorded crime and crime experienced by retailers.
While some put the rise in customer theft down to financial hardship, BRC’s director general Stephen Robertson refuses to let the recession to be used as an excuse. “The increase in retail crime during the recession can’t be justified as a move from ‘greed’ to ‘need’. Whatever the motivation, shoplifting is never victimless or acceptable. The cash costs are met by honest customers who end up paying more and the human costs by shop staff who intervene,” he said.
 “It’s shocking that a shop theft happens almost every minute, 24 hours a day. We need tougher sentencing to deter thieves and more consistent use of fixed penalty notices between police forces. Too many fines for shoplifting remain unpaid.  We need more effective enforcement so they aren’t devalued as a deterrent.”
 Based on the findings in this survey, the BRC has compiled a list of recommendations with a major focus on better engagement between police and local shops. Retailers should be genuinely involved in setting local crime priorities and treated as key partners in the community.
The BRC also calls for more police focus on tackling serious and organised crime against businesses, and better co-ordination of offences that cross police boundaries.
Robertson added: “The police and criminal justice system must take retail theft more seriously. There’s been some progress but, with a fifth of retailers saying they don’t report crime because they have no confidence in the police and two thirds of shop thefts going unreported, not enough.”