Retail loss prevention

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Retail loss prevention is historically the prevention of theft from retail establishments (colloquially known as "shrinkage") but in recent years has expanded to the controversial practice of demanding substantial and often unjustifiable sums for the administrative processing of alleged theft claims, generally without any criminal charges having been brought, let alone convictions secured.^[1]

According to the Citizens' Advice Bureau (CAB) these "civil recovery" claims have been made against customers who are children, mentally ill, who have made genuine errors in self-service checkouts, or against whom no evidence has been presented.^[2][3] The company Retail Loss Prevention Limited have reacted to criticism by threatening to sue CAB and the website Legal Beagles for libel^[4], which has been cited as an example of the problems with English defamation law.^[1]

The claims can be couched in intimidating terms, including references to bankruptcy proceedings (often false, as these can only be invoked for sums above a certain limit, £750 in England and £1,500 in Scotland as of 2010), and debt collection agencies have been instructed to collect from children.

As far as is known, most individuals who challenge the charges hear no further about them and only four of an estimated 600,000 or more demands are known to have been upheld in court. In one case, charges of £137.50 were rejected by a court; a sum of £98.55 was admitted under cross examination to be in reality £17, and even this is arguably not a directly attributable cost as the security manager concerned was simply performing his job.^{[5] [6][7] [8]}

CAB's report Uncivil Recovery references counsel's opinion and concludes:

The more than 10,000 cases of a civil recovery demand handled by Citizens Advice Bureaux since 2007 – including the more than 300 cases studied in detail by Citizens Advice, of which 30 are set out in this report – strongly suggest that very few, if any, unpaid civil recovery demands are ever successfully pursued by means of the threatened county court proceedings, at least where the claim is fully contested. And this dearth of successfully litigated, contested court claims in respect of an unpaid demand may well be explained by the key conclusion of the formal Counsel’s opinion obtained by Citizens Advice: that the relevant case law provides no obvious legal authority for most if not all such civil recovery demands.

— Uncivil Recovery, Citizens' Advice Bureau, December 2010

• Retail
• Shoplifting
• Store detective
• Tamper resistance

• HowStuffWorks: How anti-shoplifting devices work