Then they travel to the next town and start emptying your bank account. The shortest time between stealing a card and withdrawing foreign currency from a travel agency has been recorded at just one hour.

According to Rick Ball, community safety sergeant with North Yorkshire Police: "They travel all over the Midlands, stealing into NHS hospitals, business premises, shops. You name it, they get in there."

But Ball is not sitting on the touchline watching the Coventry Falcons play their nasty little game. He is helping get a new business crime-busting initiative off the ground. The National Intelligence Sharing Alliance (n.isa) is a partnership between the police and businesses, aimed at putting criminal teams like the Coventry Falcons into touch for good.

It is unique in its strategy of gathering information on business crime from all round the UK, analysing it and then feeding it back to all its members - retailers, shopping centres, other businesses and police forces. The Alliance wants to clip the wings of the Coventry Falcons and criminals like them by creating a national information sharing partnership between police and businesses, making sure there's nowhere left for them to hide.

Launched last June, n.isa is the initiative of the North East Regional Crime Partnership working with the Midlands Regional Crime Initiative, the Scottish Business Crime Centre and Retailers Against Crime York. These four bodies have been sharing information on an informal basis since 2004. And the concept works, says Anne Tate, n.isa chief executive: "We've made many arrests based on information gathered. It's a very proactive approach, involving the police and retail businesses. We get the police, regional and national loss prevention and security managers to throw all their information into a pot to create a bigger picture."

Based in Leeds, Tate is working to overcome n.isa's apparent north-south divide by talking to all retail park and shopping centre owners in the UK to encourage them to join in. "Essentially we want to extend the concept to any business that wants to take part - anyone who feels they have intelligence to share."

Tate is also talking to the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) to get all the UK's different police forces involved. The scheme has received Home Office blessing - but no funding. N.isa needs funding, says Tate, to employ information co-ordination and analysis teams to sit alongside the regional police intelligence units.

There are lots of local and regional retail and business crime initiatives already in place, says Tate, and n.isa does not want to divert funding away from any of these. Rather, it wants to act as a co-odinating body across the whole of the UK to produce an overall picture of retail and business crime. Tate hopes to have all the government's regional Crime Reduction Partnerships linked into n.isa as well.

"We can then cascade information out to our members and partners and ask them: 'What else do you know? What else can you contribute to the picture?' From that we can give the whole package to the police to take further."

So far, says Tate, the idea of n.isa is receiving overwhelming support. The problem is raising funds to pay for it, as retailers don't have an awful lot of spare money. As one supermarket security manager recently put it: "For every £1 you ask me to pay towards the cost, I have to shift £17 worth of goods off the shelf to pay for it."

But Tate is now talking to property developers, managing agents and various grant-giving bodies, and hopes to have some funding in place by May or June. "We're very close to getting funding in place for the North-East, the Midlands, and Yorkshire and Humberside," she says.

Tate also wants to have the first four n.isa regional hubs up and running by the end of the year. Eventually, n.isa will have nine regional hubs in England with the same boundaries as Government Office Regions.

Apart from giving the Coventry Falcons nowhere left to play, one other benefit of n.isa should be a clearer picture of the real cost of retail crime in the UK. According to Tate, the British Retail Consortium reports that retail crime has increased by around 12 per cent over the past year. "In the North East, that equates to about two full-time jobs for every retail outlet trading there."

Tate has more gloomy statistics to share: 74 per cent of businesses in the UK have been affected by crime at least once in the past 12 months; 20-25 per cent of all crime occurs on business premises; and 30 per cent of businesses, particularly SMEs, report direct disruption to trading as a result of crime. "And our own survey of 2,000 businesses suggests that 94 per cent of those who responded experienced some form of crime, and a staggering 52 per cent were repeat victims."

Hosting a session on retail crime at the recent BCSC management conference in Manchester, Tate said that one reason she and Sergeant Ball got involved in n.isa was because they were getting more and more complaints from businesses who felt isolated, neglected and ignored by the police in their ongoing fight against retail crime.

"People were working very much in isolation and had very little confidence in the police doing anything to proactively reduce crime," she says. "Even when offenders were caught, they were generally getting very light sentences from the courts, which didn't stop them from re-offending.

"But the overwhelming statistic for us was that for every crime reported to the police, at least another eight went unreported. What was happening to that information? How could we get hold of it to catch the people perpetrating the crime?"

What n.isa is trying to do, says Tate, is to get businesses to work together. "They have the information, and the smallest bit of information can often help us put another piece into the jigsaw." And it works. According to Tate, "Fenwicks department store in Newcastle reckons that for every shop thief they can deter, they save a minimum of £100 a time."

It also appears that the hidden scale of business crime is finally beginning to get through to Whitehall. Ball reports that at a recent meeting of ACPO, chief police officers were told that the Home Office was going to require them to measure and report on commercial burglary. "They'll have to report back on their commercial burglary rates - and show they're doing something to reduce them," he says. "What we want to do is get all the separate systems to feed into a regional co-ordinator and use that information in conjunction with the police to stop criminals at the door, so that they don't commit crime in the first place."

Score: one up to business and the police; Coventry Falcons sent off the pitch for good.

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