News

The Conservative Party have announced a range of new employment policies to deliver more rights for workers.  This also includes a commitment to increase the National Living Wage rates to raise in line with median earnings until 2022.  The full list of policies are detailed below;

ACS has responded to the government’s consultation which sets out their proposals to change the range of sanctions available to tackle the illicit tobacco trade, calling on them to focus their resources on making better use of existing sanctions.

There are only 10 days to go until the Standardised Packaging of Tobacco Regulations and Tobacco Products Directive’s sell through period ends. From 20th May 2017, retailers must ensure that all their stock is compliant with the new regulations.

From 20^th May, retailers must ensure that they only sell:

The Home Office have published the latest figures from the 2016 Commercial Victimisation Survey, showing that there were around 3.5m incidents of customer theft against businesses in 2016, up from 3.4m in the year before, with a total of 5.2m crimes committed against wholesale and retail premises.

From today (May 5^th), the paper £5 note will be withdrawn from circulation after being replaced with the polymer £5 note. The co-circulation period for the two notes began on 13^th September 2016.

Retailers, banks and building societies do not have to accept the old £5 note after May 5^th, although some may do so at their own discretion. The Bank of England will always exchange its old-series notes.

Voting will take place today between 7:00am and 10:00pm for the local and mayoral elections.

Elections will be held in 34 councils in England, all 32 councils in Scotland and all 22 councils in Wales. In addition, six areas in England are voting for newly-created “combined local authority mayors”.

ACS has raised concerns about the levels of branded tobacco products that remain in circulation ahead of the introduction of the standardised packaging regulations on 20^th May.

Data from the Retail Data Partnership collected from around 2,500 convenience stores during the final week of March showed that:

A group of organisations including ACS has written to the three main political parties, calling for fundamental reform of the business rates system.

The group has highlighted the following issues in the letter:

ACS has called on energy regulator Ofgem to ensure that local shops and other small businesses are included in proposals to limit backbilling of electricity and gas. Currently, suppliers have signed up to voluntary agreements to only backbill domestic consumers for a maximum of 12 months.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) have released crime figures for the year ending December 2016 in England and Wales, revealing an 8% jump in recorded shop theft incidents.

The figures show that there were approximately 358,235 incidents of shop theft in 2016, which is over 25,000 more incidents than in 2015.  The figures support ACS’ own crime survey which also showed an increase in shop theft.