In June 2026 the Association of Town and City Management ran an online discussion between local authorities, BIDs and other members, entitled ‘Is there an organised crime crisis on the high street?’
Some contributors to the discussion thought the answer to that question was a resounding yes, with one location suggesting that the only demand for vacant units in their town was from businesses involved in one way or another with organised crime, including money laundering, tax evasion and ‘phoenixing’, the sale of counterfeit goods, stolen goods and illicit goods such as drugs.
This really matters. We know that the high street is undergoing a transitional phase that will reshape its purpose, with an oversupply of retail and services leading to new uses such as wellbeing, education, hospitality and culture. But what if this is the best-case scenario?
In places that cannot sustain the demand for such uses, the anecdotal evidence above suggests that some places are attracting organised crime groups instead, and at scale.
Data gap
We have a data gap, certainly. The National Crime Agency and the Home Office have long acknowledged that there is under-reporting of such activity and that the most effective tools for understanding the scale of the crime through using models that look, say, at tax gaps or illicit trading patterns, provide an incomplete picture.
However, notwithstanding the unknowns, Trading Standards’ ‘In Plain Sight’ initiative puts organised crime on UK high streets as the greatest threat they face.
This red flag has not given rise to greater investment in resources. However, local authorities and police forces face an increasingly difficult task in keeping pace with the changing nature of high street crime. Years of budget pressures have left Trading Standards departments with fewer officers, while neighbourhood policing has been stretched across an ever-growing range of priorities. Yet enforcement cannot rely on suspicion alone. Intel must be backed by evidence that will stand up in court.
Investigating illicit tobacco, illegal vapes, counterfeit goods and businesses operating outside the law is time-consuming and resource-intensive, often requiring coordinated action between councils, police, HMRC and HM Border Force. Raids, seizures and prosecutions inevitably take time and resource and there is concern among those agencies that the battle is being lost.
Therefore, as the model catches on, we are likely to see a rapid growth of illegal operations.
What’s going on?
So, what do we know about what’s going on? Different types of crime taking place in retail units can be linked via organised crime groups, but they aren’t always, with different criminal networks specialising in different roles.
Money laundering
Money laundering is the process of hiding the origins of cash generated through illegal means by sending it through a series of legitimate operations.
The National Crime Agency estimates that at least £1bn is laundered through UK high streets annually. Given what we know about the profit margins of legitimate businesses, this figure would support the idea that in some places, organised crime-led retail forms a significant proportion of activity in commercial centres.
Phoenixing
This is the circular process of evading various forms of tax by setting up companies with dummy directors, failing to pay tax and then shutting down the company, only to reopen as a new company with new dummy directors.
This is a small but growing issue highlighted recently in the investigations run by London Centric into some American candy and “Harry Potter” stores. Evidence so far is patchy and appears in case study form through insolvency proceedings.
Sale of counterfeit goods
This includes, but is not limited to, cigarettes, vapes, fragrance and ‘designer’ goods.
This crime is often related to other forms of organised crime such as money laundering and the sale of illicit goods such as drugs, and has been challenging to isolate as a separate issue.
The OECD, looking at this issue in a global scale, estimates this as a market is worth ‘hundreds of billions’ , often exploited by organised crime groups and operating in ‘hotspot’ areas. In Manchester, Operation Vulcan seized over a thousand tonnes of counterfeit goods in the Cheetham Hill and Strangeways area.
Sale of illegal goods
Including, but not limited to, drugs, cigarettes, vapes and goods stolen from other premises, this practice has impacted the high street in a few ways.
The OECD estimates that the smuggling of counterfeit goods to be sold in UK retail premises resulted in about £6.3bn in lost sales of legitimate goods in 2018, falling substantially to around £4.8bn in 2021. However, illegal goods including tobacco and alcohol are manufactured at a large scale domestically and there seem to be no figures for the lost sales associated with these goods.
This also results in lost tax to the Exchequer, although estimates vary and are limited to tobacco (£2.5bn annually) and alcohol (£1.3bn), according to the Association of Convenience Stores.
There are associated health impacts resulting from illegally manufactured alcohol and tobacco, including increased toxicity, lower barriers to take-up due to lower cost, and the increased risk of housefires resulting from failure to meet ‘Reduced Ignition Propensity’ standards which extinguish discarded cigarettes automatically.
BIDs and other local business community organisations regularly raise the issue of resale of locally shoplifted goods. There have been a number of pilots and local operations to tackle this issue, including a ‘SelectaDNA’ pilot in the London Borough of Merton, which saw around 5,000 items marked and then tracked. This led to around £150,000 worth of items recovered and 15 arrests made, hinting at the scale of the problem.
Evidence base
Illegal practices including those set out above are being perpetrated at scale, although the evidence base is inadequate, generalised and difficult to quantify.
With such scant data, there is a tendency to generalise and speculate about what is happening on high streets and crucially, misconceptions around particular communities or types of businesses that are seen as perpetrators.
There is a broader ‘place’ problem too: when communities see shops selling illegal products or suspect that some businesses aren’t playing by the rules, confidence in town centres begins to erode.
If we want thriving, trusted town centres, it’s important for government to ensure that local authorities and law enforcement have the resources, powers and intelligence needed to target those who operate outside the law.
Policy moves
In policy terms there are some moves towards this, with the creation of a ‘multi-agency coordination cell’ within the National Crime Agency, and a £30m blitz on ‘Dodgy High Street Shops’ announced in May 2026.
Trading standards have also been funded to the tune of an additional £6m to strengthen training to spot suspicious activity, and increase inspection capacity, and the Metropolitan Police have been rolling out facial recognition technology in high street settings both to target shoplifters and organised crime gang members.
Much of this was being delivered under the Sunak Government’s ‘No Place to Hide’ strategy of 2023, with a focus on greater powers to extend closure orders, regional taskforces to tackle hotspots and more flexibility around data collection.
How effective these measures are, nearly halfway through the strategy is unclear as we are yet to see a published assessment of progress. But easing the pressure on those tasked with tackling this complex pattern of linked criminality is vital if we are to build the reputation of high streets as places that people wish both to visit and set up legitimate businesses.
Supporting places
For those responsible for our high streets, this is not simply a question of crime and enforcement. It is also about how we manage and support places.
Town centres with persistent vacancies, weak demand and limited capacity to manage change can become more vulnerable to uses that undermine confidence among residents, visitors and legitimate traders.
Tackling that requires enforcement where the law is being broken, but it also means understanding why these activities are able to take hold, and creating the conditions in which good businesses and new uses can succeed.
At The High Street Consultancy, we work with local authorities, BIDs, landlords and other partners to understand what is happening in their town centres, identify the barriers to positive change and develop practical responses. If some of the issues discussed here sound familiar in your place, we’d be interested to hear from you.
