Industry focus
Supercharged Business Crime Fighting
NRCA AND UKPAC Merge to Meet Challenge of Business Crime Postcode Lottery
It has always been hard to find fault with the argument that the economics of business crime fighting have never really added up. It has traditionally been viewed as ubiquitous in every town, city, and rural location because those who commit it have been united in their ability to exploit the complexity and resources required to fight it. The same cannot be said for the divisions in the law enforcement community and criminal justice system.
Over the last twenty years the thin blue line has been systematically under-funded to the point that the people, profits, and property of businesses did not register as policing or prosecution priorities, despite the impact on victims of violent retail crime, job security, and the wider economy being under siege from what the BRC and the media referred to as a “shoplifting epidemic”.
Criminals have confidently banked on the fact they can perpetrate and share scams with impunity safe in the knowledge that the policing community and criminal justice system do not have enough officers, court sitting times, statutes, or prison spaces to adequately deal with the increasing levels of retail crime, persistent and prolific shoplifting, anti-social behaviour, violence and aggression, not to mention the mushroom cloud of online theft and fraud committed daily by armchair fences via a black market feeding frenzy across a proliferation of digital platforms and social media channels.
It could be years before Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s plans to dramatically reduce the number of police forces across the UK come to fruition. In the meantime, police forces remain prisoners of geography, with forty-three UK constabularies and 32 policing boroughs in London alone often failing to share intelligence beyond their own borders even when provided with gift wrapped intelligence by national retail analysts.
All of this has coincided with evidence of shrink-inducing hacks and scams involving millions of pounds worth of corporate theft being kept away from police forces by being directed into what became universally and cynically recognised as the oubliette of Action Fraud, never to be heard from again.
This in turn led to high levels of under-reporting as businesses felt neglected or “left to their own devices” and resorting to having to spend millions of pounds on technologies such as body worn cameras to protect their staff and stores.
The Perfect Storm
Much of the approach to dealing with retail crime and anti-social behaviour was often based upon a false narrative which relied upon perception rather than reality and has added to the perfect storm on today’s high street.
Figures around police numbers, attendance at stores, and arrests have resulted in many reported cases being closed as a result of non-identification of offenders and less than two per cent of shoplifters receiving a custodial sentence with many repeat offenders receiving a fine or community order.
Police often use alternative orders such as street cautions or other non-custodial measures rather than arresting and processing suspects. This was fuelled by the notion that shoplifting was somehow a minor offence rather than a gateway crime to more serious offending, a notion exploded by widespread media coverage and video footage of the kind of violent assaults and steaming activity that characterise the reality in many high-risk high streets.
This notion also failed to recognise that in addition to smaller scale persistent and prolific local offenders, much of business crime has been driven by organised travelling gangs who cross force lines with impunity, knowing police forces will not share cross-border criminal data. Many also steal to order to fund wider criminality and a thriving black market in the sale of illicit goods. This series of false perceptions has fuelled high levels of under-reporting because they believe that no action will be taken.
This has further fuelled a decriminalisation perception not helped by the soon-to-be repealed Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014 which was branded the “shoplifters charter” because it was seen as providing police and offenders with the “get out of jail card” of only dealing with the theft of goods under £200 as a “summary offence”.
As a result, we have witnessed unprecedented levels of retail theft and in some cases the creation of a new form of criminality, the middle class “SWIPERS”, an acronym for “Seemingly Well-Intentioned Patrons Engaging in Regular Shoplifting” coined by criminology professor Emmeline Taylor.
These individuals, often in well-paid jobs, are stealing items like premium food, wine, or clothing, sometimes for the “thrill” or out of a sense of entitlement, rather than necessity and driven by the notion that they are unlikely to be caught or prosecuted. This has all resulted in record levels of theft with shoplifting hitting the “epidemic” £2 billion mark in the 2025 BRC Crime Survey figures.
Changing Attitude
The widely held perception of police indifference is now changing to a large extent with the Government’s Fighting Retail Crime Together strategy and the passing into law of the far-reaching Crime and Policing Bill 2025 which introduced the brand-new offence of assaulting a shopworker, which carries an unlimited fine or six months in prison.
Now the hard work of the National Business Crime Centre (NBCC) and the creation of Pegasus and Opal, the industry-funded initiatives to tackle the serious and acquisitive crime impacting our high streets, have added fire power to the fight against business crime.
There is an appetite for stricter more consistent sentencing, and a fight back from the retail industry with many businesses looking to introduce facial recognition systems at the front of stores to prevent certain individuals entering stores in the first instance.
But there remain gaps in national and local policing as well as on-the-ground intelligence and collaboration. There are pockets of excellence through levy-funded business improvement districts (BIDs) and business crime reduction partnerships (BCRPs) sharing real time data with sympathetic Police and Crime Commissioners, but there are also wide swathes of the UK still exposed to the vulnerabilities of postcode lotteries where crime intelligence gathering is still at the embryonic development stage.
Merger of NRCA and UKPAC
But all of that could soon change with intelligence gaps in business crime data sharing and reporting looking set to be plugged by the coming together of two leading not-for-profit business-crime organisations, National Retail Crime Alliance (NRCA) and UK Partners Against Crime (UKPAC).
In January the NRCA, previously the National Business Crime Solution, announced that they are joining forces with UKPAC to represent those as yet under-represented parts of the UK by forming a single, strengthened national organisation dedicated to reducing business crime across the UK.
This, the new merged body says, will be achieved through the consistent sharing of data to reduce retail and freight theft, violence, aggression and anti-social behaviour to the industrial levels of fraud and organised criminal activity affecting businesses, staff, customers and communities.
Both the NRCA and UKPAC have long championed a collaborative, intelligence-led approach, and this merger creates a unified and more powerful organisation, combining:
- NRCA’s established national retail membership, advanced data analytics, freight, logistics expertise, and deep knowledge of the resale of stolen goods, and online crime black and grey markets as part of its cross-sector intelligence team and infrastructure.
- UKPAC’s broad cross-sector reach which includes retail, hospitality, rural businesses and the night-time economy, and its secure, GDPR-compliant crime-reporting hub SentrySIS.
Working separately, both organisations have already achieved great success over the last decade. In a recent article published in Loss Prevention Magazine Europe, NRCA (which was the NBCS at the time) was interviewed about its use of covert operations to effectively expose the true extent of the black market in stolen goods ending up at car boot sales through its “Operation Sale”.
Working with thirteen different police forces, four Government agencies, and thirteen BIDs, the then NBCS researched the problem in some detail and distilled them into key findings.
These included a proven hypothesis that the focus of law enforcement has always been on the thief rather than the fence, meaning the handlers and consumers of those products are able to operate with relative impunity. Trading Standards departments which operate to penetrate such activities are often overwhelmed by different priorities as a result of local authority cuts.
In addition, this supported a “Del Boy” theory of the likeable and useful local rogue as well as the fact that consumers who benefit from these transactions are less likely to report such incidents for fear of losing their own supply of hooky items.
Part of the extensive research involved undercover operations and surveillance at car boot sales which are often held in large open fields or spaces.
At one car boot location, seventeen vehicles of interest linked to shoplifting offences on the NRCA’s database, one third of the vehicles at the site on that day, were identified during undercover surveillance.
UKPAC’s separate contribution has also made a dramatic impact with a worked-through multi-agency methodology connecting those private and public bodies involved in preventing retail crime from the arrest to the point of prosecution. It even facilitated treatment programmes in the case of some prolific and persistent shop thieves who are addicted to drugs and steal to feed their habits.
From the retailer to the BRCP, the BIDs, local authorities, the police, legal professionals, and even the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), UKPAC’s co-operative approach, which is focused on improving trading and community safety, had started the long journey to build a national collaborative movement from a local base of a County Partnership Model.
Where NRCA had put in place information sharing agreements (ISAs) with all forty-three police forces across the UK, UKPAC had garnered its own support largely in the south of the country with backing from Police and Crime Commissioners (PCC) for Dorset and Hampshire, and Devon and Cornwall, for example.
In Devon and Cornwall, UKPAC has worked with the force’s tactical business crime lead Sergeant Chris Chaloner to map and manage the challenges of one of the UK’s most diverse geographical constabulary areas which covers almost 4,000 square miles of land including the Isles of Scilly and 730 miles of coastline. A largely rural community, retail crime and anti-social behaviour still pose major challenges in the force’s three cities, Exeter, Plymouth, and Truro. as well as the myriad of seaside towns and villages.
“Business crime has become a neighbourhood policing priority that fits into our central strategy,” said Chris, who is based in Plymouth.
The city regions had support from BIDs and BRCPs, but this was not the case for some other areas such as Saltash, Liskeard, and Barnstaple who fell outside the public private remit of these bodies.
One of the other big areas of concern was Torbay, the English Riveria which takes in Torquay and Paignton, which are major holiday destinations for thousands of tourists every year.
“Torbay did not have its own BCRP so that was a role that has been taken over by UKPAC as part of a twelve-month free trial. It’s still early days, but we have a persistent voice for the business community,” he said.
All of these areas are benefitting from UKPAC support funded by the PCC, Alison Hernandez whose stated vision is: “A flourishing business community working closely with the partners, police, local, and national Government to prevent and reduce crime”.
Retailers in the areas supported by UKPAC can now also directly report to police through the SentrySIS platform which, according to Chris, speeds up the process.
“This quick and easy way of reporting can save weeks in terms of reporting and investigation,” he said.
Chris, who joined Devon & Cornwall in 2014, said: “It works well with us because there is a recognition that we can’t arrest our way of the problem, but we can help to make it easier to report crime and adopt targeted approaches to it through working together to prevent it in the first instance.”
“It’s a positive move and not-for-profit and essentially helps make our community a safer place to be.”
“I love the partnership work and engagement with business because working together is making us all more efficient and collaborative as part of a different approach,” he added.
Working Together
The idea behind the new NRCA and UKPAC merger is to provide a seamless national network for businesses, law enforcement, and community stakeholders.
Its launch mission says: “As the home of a national data network spanning retail, freight, online, hospitality, and rural sectors, the merged entity will deliver an effective, data-led crime reduction strategy, offering clear value to members while reinvesting any surplus into crime prevention, intelligence gathering and community safety.”
As not-for-profit organisations, NRCA and UKPAC will exist solely to serve businesses, staff, customers, and the wider community. The two organisations argue that the merger reinforces their shared mission to reduce not only financial losses, but also the fear, abuse, aggression, and anti-social behaviour experienced by frontline staff, customers, and local communities.
And, by pooling resources, data, intelligence, and sector-wide expertise, the new organisation will offer all businesses a practical and effective route to a safer trading environment. Police, local authorities, BCRPs, and community safety partners will benefit from a stronger, more credible national partner, delivering reliable data, timely referrals, exclusion and offender-management support and a trusted mechanism for collaboration.
Points of Differentiation
A number of larger retail businesses have already invested in crime sharing and incident management software, but NRCA/UKPAC argues that this does not provide the whole story.
“NRCA/UKPAC is not simply a platform provider,” said CEO of NRCA Jason Trigg.
“We are a not-for-profit organisation with a dedicated intelligence and analysis team, working directly with retailers of all sizes, as well as all types of businesses in collaborative partnership with law enforcement, local authorities, BCRP’s and BIDs to identify, assess, and develop actionable intelligence relating to local prolific, regional, and organised retail crime and associated offending.”
“Our operating model adopts a system-agnostic approach, ensuring compatibility with all incident reporting platforms. It includes a one-touch crime reporting and evidence submission module that is approved for use by police forces and fully integrated with their internal systems and is currently operational in Devon and Cornwall, among others.”
“By removing complexity and duplication, the approach simplifies reporting for all stakeholders and ultimately enhances operational efficiency for police forces,” he continued.
“And whilst technology and our platform support this work, it is not our full-service offer in isolation. The value NRCA/UKPAC provides lies in the intelligence capability, governance, and collaborative partnership model, rather than the provision of a commercial software platform alone.”
Benefits
Key benefits for members will be:
- Expanded sector and geographic coverage: Members across retail, online, freight, rural, hospitality, and the night-time economy will benefit from a truly national network, closing gaps between regions and sectors.
- Streamlined intelligence sharing and reporting: A single, centralised, crime-reporting platform and intelligence hub will simplify reporting, speed up evidence gathering and improve liaison with police and authorities, reducing the administrative burden on businesses.
- Improved detection, deterrence, and recovery: By pooling data, analytics, and specialist expertise, the business will be better equipped to identify persistent or organised offenders, support criminal prosecutions, disrupt criminal networks, and recover losses through civil recovery or other legal action.
- An inclusive, affordable membership model: Operating as a co-operative, not-for-profit organisation ensures accessibility for businesses of all sizes, with surplus funds reinvested into crime prevention, intelligence, and member support rather than profit.
In terms of law enforcement, the new merged body pledges:
- A stronger national intelligence picture: With contributions from a broader and more diverse business base, law enforcement will be provided with richer data on incident patterns, prolific offenders, cross-border criminality and emerging trends, all of which will support more effective decision-making and resource allocation.
- Bridging intelligence gaps across sectors and geography: The merger removes traditional boundaries between retail, online, freight, rural, and hospitality sectors, improving visibility of criminal activity that operates across multiple environments, such as stolen goods resale, freight theft, and rural crime.
- Faster, more coherent collaboration and referrals through a unified platform: Enabling quicker reporting, intelligence sharing, evidence gathering support, and referrals to assist police, local authorities, BCRPs and partner agencies who can then respond more consistently and effectively.
- Support for national and local crime-reduction strategies: Here, the new organisation will strengthen the wider national framework for tackling business crime, aligning with policing leads, umbrella bodies, and strategic initiatives that call for consistent, joined-up collaboration between industry and law enforcement.
Gareth Lewis, the chairman of UKPAC and former head of loss prevention and safety for Southern Co-op said:
“By joining together, we are building one national network, crossing sectors, borders, and business types that can stand up to increasing levels of business crime.”
Jason Trigg added: “Our mission has always been to deliver actionable intelligence, real-time support, and effective prevention. As NRCA and TruckPol, we pioneered a data-driven, collaborative approach. Together, we can now amplify that impact, reshaping the landscape, challenging established thinking, and uniting like-minded organisations for the greater good.”
Partnership and policing are on the march with the newly merged data sharing body which could provide the missing piece of the national jigsaw in the fight against business crime.
For more information, business owners, industry partners, police forces, and community stakeholders can visit the organisations’ websites or contact the leadership teams at:
NRCA: simon.ford@nrca.co.uk
UKPAC: info@uk-pac.com
