Shoplifting: East Grinstead and Uckfield
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent assessment her Department has made of trends in the level of shoplifting in East Grinstead and Uckfield constituency.
Answered by Sarah Jones
We delivered more than 3,000 additional police officers and PCSOs into neighbourhood roles since March 2025.There are signs the tide is turning, with a small fall in shop theft offences by 1% in the year ending December 2025 compared with the previous year. This is compared with increases of nearly 30% in the period before the election.
We are removing the £200 threshold for shop theft and commencing the new offence of assaulting a retail worker as soon as possible.
We are also equipping the police to fight the organised crime gangs that drive shop theft across the country. Our £5m investment in the specialist OPAL policing unit is boosting intelligence-led policing to identify offenders, disrupt the tactics used to target shops, and bring more criminals to justice.
The Home Office collects and publishes information on the number of Shoplifting offences recorded by the police in England and Wales. This information is published at Force and Community Safety Partnership level for Sussex police.
The latest information, for the year ending December 2025, is available here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/police-recorded-crime-and-outcomes-open-data-ta…
Data by constituency level is not published.
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