Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood walked beside Ed Thomas on Soho Road in Birmingham last week, past mini-marts she said were being taken over by “organised crime [and] immigration criminality”. Hours earlier, police had raided one of those shops, seizing illegal cigarettes and snuff, and arresting a student from Afghanistan after finding a makeshift weapon—a plank with a nail—under the counter. “Perhaps you should ask the manager, he’s the owner,” the shopworker told the BBC when asked why he sold the illicit goods. The owner, he said, was not about.
That raid was part of a nine-month BBC investigation that exposed drug gangs, child sexual exploitation, money laundering and immigration crime linked to shops selling illegal cigarettes, vapes and drugs. Now, the government has announced it will double the maximum closure time for such rogue businesses in England and Wales—from six months to a full year.
“Illegal shops can now be closed for up to a year after BBC investigation into organised crime on high streets.”
Under current rules, authorities can shut a shop for three months, with an option to extend to six using anti-social behaviour legislation. The Home Office says the extended closures will give investigators more time to gather evidence, pursue prosecutions and identify business owners, while preventing rogue operators from simply reopening and resuming illegal activity.
Mahmood praised the BBC’s reporting, saying the government was “not prepared to tolerate” the takeover of high streets by criminality. This type of crime “makes people lose faith, not just in their local area but in democracy, in what our country is, and we can’t let that happen”, she added.
The announcement has been welcomed by Trading Standards officers, who have repeatedly told the BBC they lack the necessary powers to tackle the problem. “Closure orders are a key enforcement tool… for tackling ‘dodgy shops’,” said John Herriman, chief executive of the Chartered Trading Standards Institute (CTSI). He said there is “almost universal support” from his profession for the new measures.
Other Trading Standards officers told the BBC it would become less financially viable for unscrupulous business owners to simply sit out closure orders, and would force landlords to pay more attention to who they are renting to.
On Soho Road, a high street bordering Mahmood’s own constituency, the shopworker—who said he was a student from Afghanistan—admitted he thought selling illegal cigarettes was wrong. But the owner was absent. Under the new powers, the shop could now face a closure of up to 12 months, giving authorities time to trace the people ultimately responsible.