How Guildford’s BID has driven down low-level business crime – and can prove it

As Guildford’s Business Improvement District – ‘Experience Guildford’ – approaches the end of its second five-year term, Pete Lambert, the Town Safety & Venue Liaison Manager, is confident of re-election, thanks among other things, to the strength of its Business Crime Reduction Partnership.

“We’ve had the BCRP for information-sharing for the best part of 10 years, and we’ve been using the Disc system for much of that time, providing a secure platform to share information on shoplifting and antisocial behaviour.

“But it wasn’t until I took over in 2020 that we actively started pushing our exclusion scheme: collectively barring individuals from member premises. Until then we weren’t getting a huge amount of engagement from our levy-payers. That was largely because few incidents were being investigated by police, especially if they were one-off incidents or if there was no known offender. Naturally, this left retailers wondering if there was any point in reporting low-level crime at all.

For the full case study click below:

Case-study-Guildford_V2.pdf (discagainstcrime.com)