M&S Director Demands Government Action After Staff Attacked, Stores Swarmed

Within a single week, a Marks & Spencer employee was taken to hospital after an ammonia attack and another was headbutted on the shop floor. That was the reality Retail Director Thinus Keeve documented in an open letter posted to the M&S website, directly naming London Mayor Sadiq Khan and the UK government as failing to protect the people serving customers every day. "Without a government seriously cracking down on crime and a mayor that prioritises effective policing, we are..." Keeve wrote, in language that marked a sharp public departure from the careful corporate diplomacy most retailers deploy.

Keeve, who took up the newly created Retail Director role on 6 June 2025 and oversees all M&S stores across the UK and Republic of Ireland, published the letter days after the M&S branch on Clapham High Street became the focal point of disorder tied to a TikTok trend encouraging young people to "swarm the streets." The initial incident unfolded on Saturday 28 March 2025 at around 6:45pm, when police responded to reports of approximately 100 young people causing anti-social behaviour and stealing from businesses. Footage showed screaming teenagers pushing each other and knocking food off shelves inside the store while others filmed on their phones. A security guard reportedly locked customers inside during the chaos.

The disorder escalated on Tuesday, when several hundred young people returned to the area, forcing shops to close and leaving families barricaded inside a supermarket. The Metropolitan Police deployed 100 officers; four of them and one member of the public were assaulted before a dispersal order was imposed. Six teenagers were arrested in total, including two 16-year-olds and a 15-year-old detained on the Saturday for theft and assault. Detective Chief Superintendent Emma Bond, who leads policing across the Clapham area, appealed to parents to "take responsibility, to be proactive in knowing where their children are and who they're with."

M&S CEO Stuart Machin rejected official claims that crime is falling. "I keep hearing crime is falling, especially in London, something none of us believe, and very few people working in retail would see," he said. The data supports his scepticism. The British Retail Consortium's Crime Survey 2025 recorded more than 2,000 incidents of violence and abuse against retail workers per day in 2023/24, which the BRC called the highest rate ever recorded in the survey's history, up from 1,300 the previous year and more than four times the 455 daily incidents logged in 2020. Over 25,000 of those incidents involved a weapon, a 180% year-on-year rise.

Home Office figures showed police recorded 516,971 shop theft offences in the year ending December 2024, a 20% year-on-year increase and the highest level since current counting rules were introduced in 2002/03. The total cost of retail crime to the industry, including what retailers spend on prevention, has risen to £4.2 billion annually.

Keeve spent 12 years in senior roles at Australian supermarket chain Coles before joining M&S, giving him a comparative frame of reference that colleagues Stuart Machin and Food Managing Director Alex Freudmann share, having worked at Coles as well. His letter frames the violence not as an operational inconvenience to be managed with more security cameras, but as a question of political will: whether central government and City Hall are prepared to treat the safety of retail workers as a priority, rather than a statistic they dispute.