Shoplifting is so rampant it is time to arm security guards with truncheons: Jayne Dowle

However, chief executive Stuart Machin has written to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood and his retail director Thinus Keeve has done the same to London Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan. Their actions came after a gang of rampaging teenagers forced a M&S branch in Clapham, south London, to barricade its doors.

They point out that contrary to reports, crime is not falling. Rather, “the absolute opposite” as Keeve puts it, is occurring “in our High Streets and our stores, where our colleagues are on the receiving end of abuse and violence in their workplace every day”.

These “colleagues” include my 20-year-old daughter. Lizzie, a second-year student at university in Liverpool, who works part-time in M&S Simply Food at Lime Street railway station. We were having lunch with her older brother, Jack, the other week – he worked at our local Asda for several years – and they got talking about shoplifters.

I knew that Jack had to regularly intervene when people stole things – typically joints of meat and alcohol. One afternoon I was in the shop picking up things for tea and saw him leap into action to tackle a wild-eyed thief. It was an awful sight. In the scramble to apprehend the offender, Jack’s boss was wrestled to the ground, his glasses knocked off.

It was bad enough seeing my son potentially in danger, because the assailant could have knocked him out, or had a knife, worse even to witness the sheer hatred in the man’s eyes. Eventually, he was bundled out and Jack shrugged off the incident.

Just recently, another of Jack’s former colleagues, a lady in her sixties, not five foot tall, bravely tried to stop a fleeing shoplifter. He pushed her into the trolley bay and she broke her arm, having to take several months off work to recover.

I didn’t know however, that my daughter has found herself regularly apprehending shoplifters and chasing them through the station. “Oh, it happens all the time mum,” she said. “I just tell them to put back what they’ve taken, and if they don’t and run off, we have to go after them.”

Excuse me if I was being slightly snobbish, even naïve, but I didn’t expect this in a M&S Simply Food in a major railway station.

There are security guards, Lizzie says, but they only work certain days and hours. There also seems to be a peripatetic security guard in our local Asda. Even if there was a security guard on duty every hour the shops are open, their hands are tied.

I once went into Lidl in town and saw a horrible excuse of a man spit in the face of the security guard, who had to stand there implacable and take a load of abuse.

There’s been something of a moral panic in recent days over whether security guards should be armed with truncheons to help deal with offenders. I’d say, do it.

Lord Walker of Broxton, executive chairman of Iceland, joined in, telling reporters that “just one incident of violence against my staff is too many” citing the example of armed Spanish security guards, saying they “don’t mess about”.

As Keeve points out, across the UK, there were around 5.5 million incidents of shoplifting last year, “and that excludes the vast number that go unreported”.

What’s needed, and urgently, is for the government to put actions in place, supporting the police to respond immediately to shoplifting, targeting repeat offenders and areas which have become “crime hotspots” Keeve argues.

Also, the government should show “greater transparency on crime so the true scale and impact is understood”. And he’s right. Too often, shoplifting is dismissed, even by the public, misled into thinking that retailers only complain because it hits their profits.

What of independent retailers though? I was in a very genteel Yorkshire market town recently and overhead a gift shop owner on the phone, telling a fellow shopkeeper she was closing up early as there was a gang “out robbing”.

A recent YouGov poll showed 74 per cent of all Britons think shoplifting is a fairly or very serious crime, but only 35 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds see it as such. Given the challenges of the cost of living which the young despair of, and the lawlessness promoted by some aspects of social media, we’re treading into very dangerous territory.

And, as Keeve adds, behind every statistic “is a colleague who is simply trying to do their job and serve their customers.” When that colleague is your child – indeed anyone’s child, mother, father, sister or brother – the danger of working in a shop these days isn’t worth the wages.