Fall in shoplifting cases across Bolton, town hall hears

According to figures from Greater Manchester Police there were 1,497 shopliftings across the borough over 2025-26, a 33.4 per cent drop on the year before.

The findings were presented to Bolton Council earlier this week by district commander Chief Superintendent Helen Critchley along with a raft of other findings.

She said: “That is really pleasing to me considering that we have really strong outcome rates for shoplifting.”

“We work really hard with the retail community; we have really good engagement.

The meeting was heard at Bolton Town Hall (Image: Phil Taylor)

“So, for me it’s not an issue of under reporting, this is businesses letting us know when they need something and because of the proactive action that we’re taking against repeat shoplifters a real world decrease, in that kind of activity against our retail premises.”

Chief Supt Critchley had been addressing a meeting of the council’s corporate and external issues scrutiny committee about policing in Bolton.

He figures showed that the force had received a total of 96,103 calls over the last year, 15,021 of them classed as “grade one”.

These are 999 emergency calls that need police to be on the scene within 15 minutes.

On shoplifting, Cllr John Walsh, of Astley Bridge, asked if an issue reported by the Metropolitan Police in London that shopkeepers had often failed to provide CCTV was replicated nationally.

Chief Supt Critchley said that she could not comment on the Met Police but that GMP had worked well with retailers across the district and had not encountered this problem.

She said the force had invested in an online link that allowed shopkeepers to share CCTV footage of potential shoplifters with them.

Chief Supt Critchley: “In Greater Manchester we have worked very hard with the retail community to make it as easy as possible to share footage.”

She added: “Obtaining CCTV footage is not a huge challenge in our response to shoplifting at all.

“We find that that works really well with the businesses and that gets really good engagement so that’s not a challenge that we see.”