ACS CEO Ed Woodall on how retailers can mitigate the retail crime crisis

Retail crime in the United Kingdom has moved well past the point where it can be dismissed as a cost of doing business. Organised gangs targeting high-value products, fuel drive-offs that have become a calculated lifestyle choice for repeat offenders, and a police service stretched too thin to respond consistently have left convenience and forecourt retailers absorbing losses that run to thousands of pounds per site each year. In the latest episode of The Future of Convenience podcast, host Dan Munford brings together two people at the centre of that fight to take stock of where things stand and what retailers can actually do about it.

Ed Woodall, CEO of the Association of Convenience Stores (ACS), and Michael O’Loughlin, managing director of 360 Degrees Retail Limited and Pay My Fuel, dive into a wide-ranging conversation covering the scale of the problem, the limits of policing, and the technology solutions that are already proving their worth on the ground.

Woodall opened by putting the financial reality in stark terms: “If you take the total cost of investing in crime prevention and the total cost of crime to the sector and then divide it by the number of transactions that happen in the sector, you end up paying an 11 pence crime tax on every transaction in the convenience sector,” he said. “That is an unbelievable amount of money across the entire sector.”

Across roughly 50,000 stores, that works out to an average investment of around 6,000 pounds per site each year just to manage the problem, a figure Woodall described as an absolutely enormous burden on retailers who are, first and foremost, trying to run a business and serve their communities.

O’Loughlin, drawing on more than two decades of forecourt management experience and his work building out the Pay My Fuel platform, described a theft landscape that has shifted fundamentally in character. “No means of payment has become a lifestyle choice,” he said. “Some people call it a payday loan.” With Pay My Fuel now operating across 1,200 UK forecourts, the platform captures offender details via tablet, pursues recovery through a structured process tied to DVLA data, and reports a 70% success rate across its network. Its newest tool, an automatic number plate recognition camera system that alerts cashiers before a known offender begins fuelling, has proven even more decisive, with O’Loughlin saying the problem effectively disappears at sites where it is deployed.

Woodall was equally direct about the gap between policy and delivery when it comes to policing. “You can make all the policies you want in central government or in the courts, but if you haven’t got anyone on the ground delivering it, that hasn’t made a difference to the retailer,” he said. He acknowledged that some force are making genuine progress by investing in data-led targeting of organised offenders and visible neighbourhood patrols. But he was clear that progress remains uneven across the country, describing the current situation as a postcode lottery for most retailers. “We’ve got to look to ourselves to make sure we’re solving those problems,” Woodall added.

The conversation ultimately lands on a point both guests share: technology is no longer optional for retailers who want to protect their margins, their staff and their ability to keep trading in the communities they serve.

The Future of Convenience podcast is available on all major platforms including Spotify and Apple Podcasts, with new episodes featuring global convenience retail leaders released every other Tuesday.