Walk down almost any high street in Britain and you see the same story: the shuttered shops, the boarded-up units, the barber that never seems to have a customer but is always open.
This isn’t colour for a crime drama. It’s the frontline of a quiet war – and I’m sick of it.
That’s why I brought the National Crime Agency, Trading Standards and Companies House in front of my Select Committee in Parliament to ask a simple question: why are we allowing an organised crimewave to take over our high streets – and what are we going to do about it?
We heard how cash-only barbers, car washes and mini-marts have become the laundromats of a modern shadow economy. The National Crime Agency estimates around £12billion of criminal cash is generated in Britain every year.
Tax avoidance by dodgy firms has surged since 2019. That’s billions siphoned away from schools, hospitals and policing – and from the honest businesses who play by the rules and get undercut by those who don’t.
And where there is dirty money, there is darker crime.
We were told of barber shops used as fronts for people trafficking, prostitution and drugs. Of workers paid £4 an hour with no right to work. Of illegal vapes and illicit tobacco flooding shelves.
This is organised crime in plain sight. How has this been allowed to happen?
First, we have a franchised model of criminality. Crime groups set up networks of shops using “ghost directors” – names for hire who front dozens of businesses on paper while the real owners stay hidden. When one premises is raided, the company is dissolved, the director is swapped, the fine is pinned on a “ghost name”, and the operation simply re-opens round the corner.
Second, the state has been trying to fight 21st-century crime with last-century kit and budgets. Trading Standards budgets fell by nearly 40 per cent in the decade after 2010. Over half of services now have eight staff or fewer to police an entire local area. Some councils are spending less than £1 per head on enforcement.
Third, no-one is clearly in charge. And that vacuum is a gift to organised crime. In truth, what we are watching is the slow corrosion of shared standards – the very
“rules of the road” that hold a free society together.
So, what do we do?
We need a High Street Crime Plan built on three simple principles. First, someone must be in charge. We should appoint a national lead to bring together NCA, police, HMRC, Immigration Enforcement, Trading Standards and Companies House into permanent, properly funded local taskforces, not one-off raids when the headlines get bad.
Second, teeth for enforcement. If a shop is repeatedly breaking the law, authorities should be able to close it permanently. Companies House’s new identity verification powers must be used ruthlessly to choke off ghost directors and shell companies.
Third, backing the good guys. Honest traders need an easy way to report the premises they know are dirty. That means a single reporting route and visible multi-agency operations that show the state is on their side, not looking the other way.
If we allow criminal franchises to colonise our town centres, we won’t just lose more tax and more trade. We’ll lose the sense that Britain still plays fair, that effort is rewarded, that the rules apply to everyone.
That is the bargain our high streets are crying out for. It’s time we kept it.
