Interviews

Call for aid in business crime reduction

by Mark Rowe

Business crime reduction partnerships are just not on the radar, yet due to Covid-19 they are in trouble. Police and crime commissioners and others need to step up to aid BCRPs, a long-time man in the BCRP field says.

“It’s a cause I feel quite passionate about,” says Andy Sharman, pictured, the Somerset-based former loss prevention man who’s founder of the South West Business Crime Centre and an assessor for the NABCP (National Association of Business Crime Partnerships) accreditation of partnerships. “It’s a scary time,” he says.

When UK Government announced its measures to support business, they did not fit the model of BCRPs, because a lot of partnerships are unincorporated associations and not limited companies, Andy says. “So all the Government support was there for businesses, but community groups like BCRPs were falling through a gap.”

Andy has surveyed BCRPs, and business improvement districts (BIDs) that carry out business crime reduction, and got 70 responses from the several hundred that are around the UK – no-one quite knows how many (another issue raised by Andy; after 15 to 20 years or BCRPs, he calls it ‘terrifying’ and ‘ludicrous’ that the authorities don’t even know how many partnerships there are and where). As he acknowledges, we don’t yet know the impact of the weeks of lockdown on high streets; what shops are going to re-open. He warns of the potential for BCRPs to be lost, and how it costs far much more to re-start a BCRP – necessarily from scratch, for data protection compliance, and meanwhile high streets suffer from shop theft and associated anti-social behaviour that even before the pandemic was turning away some shoppers from some places.

“Now we know from bitter experience that when you lose a BCRP from the town, if it isn’t replaced or something is not fit for purpose, it’s a huge detriment to a community.” A high street can see a decline in footfall if people don’t feel safe in a town centre, without the intelligence on crime gathered through a BCRP and shared to its members.

Andy has come up with three recommendations to support BCRPs; continued on this link.

More in the July 2020 print issue of Professional Security magazine.

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