Friday July 24th 2026
Miles Briggs, MSP for Edinburgh and Lothians East, Scottish Conservative & Unionist Party writes his first monthly column of the new parliament for Midlothian View.
Hardly a day goes by now that I don’t hear about theft in our communities.
It seems that people have been given free range to take as they please from shops in Scotland. Thieves have been so emboldened by the lack of consequences for this behaviour that many business owners have had to take matters into their own hands, employing private security guards and fitting alarm tags to their products.
As I am sure readers are aware, Midlothian has been one of the hardest hit regions by soaring retail crime and anti-social behaviour. Police Scotland recently revealed that shoplifting incidents had increased by nearly 50% in Midlothian in the last year.
It goes without saying that this situation cannot carry on. Criminal gangs are blatantly abusing the culture of trust that civilised people have taken for granted in our country for a long time. More than 40 such gangs have been identified by Police Scotland. These are believed to have driven shoplifting cases up by nearly 20% nationally in the last year.
Unfortunately, this spike in shoplifting goes hand in hand with anti-social behaviour; in the year to March nearly 7,000 crimes against shop workers were recorded by the police. The Scottish Grocers Federation (SGF) reports that over three quarters of shops in Scotland have at least one member of staff whose wellbeing is affected by retail crime and nearly 80% of retailers have reported an increase in violence towards staff.
99% of convenience retailers believe shoplifting is a daily occurrence. The SGF believes that shoplifting costs Scotland’s convenience stores more than £50m annually.
SNP ministers have belatedly responded by establishing a Retail Crime Taskforce. Like so many SNP schemes, it sounds promising but is immediately found wanting under closer inspection. The taskforce has been given only £3m pounds of funding per year until 2029 and is composed of only 14 uniformed officers. In the first 12 months of operation, the detection rate for retail crime has increased by less than 2%.
It is no wonder that more than a quarter of retailers find police response times to be unsatisfactory.
The SNP has shown little interest in tackling the causes of soaring crime over the last 17 years and is showing an equal lack of urgency in fighting the consequences of it too. The funding for projects such as the Retail Crime Taskforce is woeful, considering the cost of theft to our businesses and economy every year. When arrests are made, the government’s delusional approach to justice does not punish thieves with sufficient severity and so the reoffending rate is high. According to the Scottish Police Authority shoplifters make up more than half of all repeat offenders of acquisitive crimes of dishonesty in Scotland.
Given the fantastical ideas SNP ministers can find millions of pounds for in every budget, solutions to the theft and abuse that businesses and their patrons deal with in Midlothian on a daily basis must be better funded. Our police officers cannot be expected to do their difficult jobs without the proper resources and leadership. If we want to avoid the complete death of our high streets, that are already under such pressure, the SNP must get real on law and order.
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