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Crime Reduction Schemes – filling the policing gap
Napoleon once famously described Britain as a ‘Nation of Shopkeepers’. Our retail industry is currently facing unprecedented pressures, especially on the High Street. This is irrespective of being a large retail brand or a small independent – the challenges are very real. The British Retail Consortium 2020 Retail crime survey estimates that over £1bn has been…
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Why, for BIDs, ‘bouncing back’ is simply not enough
Covid presents two challenges to Business Improvement Districts. One is to deliver practical assistance to levy-payers to maximise their ‘bounce back’ from lockdown. The other, put brutally, is to protect them from insolvency. Covid is an existential threat for retailers and licensed premises. BIDs that simply do what they have always done – but perhaps…
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Priti Patel: “shopworkers need protection” – local, grass roots ‘active crime reduction’ is the only way
Forget about our streets: it’s inside our corner-shops and take-aways that criminals are running riot. In July Priti Patel commanded a crack-down on abuse and violence in the retail sector. But there’s a crucial gap in her chain of command – a gap that only local retailers themselves can fill. Talk about Best Practice Guides,…
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Pubwatch schemes: here yesterday, gone tomorrow?
Right now, barely 10% of licenced premises are open. No one knows when Britain’s leisure industry will be back to work – but there’s no doubt it won’t ever be quite the same. Even before Coronavirus, a pub was closing every 12 hours across the UK. So adapting to the ‘new normal’ is only one…
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Police & Crime Commissioners must support crime reduction schemes now – before it’s too late
Coronavirus has hit public-facing service industries the hardest: tourism, travel, retail and leisure sectors are facing the biggest challenges of all. Government is doing what it can to keep these industries – and many of the business-to-business companies that support them – on life-support. But smaller – and some larger – Business Crime Reduction Partnerships…
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Exclusion Schemes and compliance with data protection law
Organisations that run exclusion schemes and use Disc for processing personal data must comply with Data Protection law, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA’18). It can be a daunting and confusing area of regulation, but vital to the lawful processing of data and so must be fully understood,…
