The BBC investigation, published Sunday, used Freedom of Information requests to reveal that more than 3,600 shops across the United Kingdom had illegal goods seized over the 2024-25 period, including counterfeit cigarettes, tobacco, and vapes. The BBC team traveled to Plymouth, Rochdale, Shrewsbury, Newport, and Bradford, documenting what it described as “brazen criminality on the High Street.”
In Hull, reporters found underground tunnels used to supply sacks of illegal cigarettes to High Street mini-marts. In Swansea, they watched officers smash windows of “stash cars” used to hide illegal cigarettes during the day and deal drugs at night. The investigation also exposed a network of shops selling illegal tobacco fronted by “ghost directors” who mask the real owners.
Then-Home Secretary Yvette Cooper described some of the BBC’s findings as a “disgrace,” the outlet reported. BBC journalists said they were repeatedly attacked and threatened during the course of their reporting.
Elijah Glantz, a research fellow into organized crime at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi), a security think tank, told the BBC that cash-intensive businesses such as nail bars, pubs, and restaurants have always been vulnerable to exploitation by criminals because cash transactions are largely untraceable. But in the last decade, Glantz said, both police and Trading Standards have been squeezed. Trading Standards staffing fell from 4,260 in 2002 to 2,378 in 2025, according to the BBC.
“There does seem to be an increase in the visibility of it,” Glantz said. “We’re looking at organised crime that has manifested because nobody has put it away, nobody has forced it underground.”
John Herriman, chief executive of the Chartered Trading Standards Institute, told the BBC: “People want to feel safe… [going] down the local High Street. The concern is that they don’t feel as safe as they used to.”
The investigation found that visible criminality and declining High Streets are shaping British politics. Nick Plumb, a director at the Power to Change think tank, said the sight of open criminality fuels feelings of “powerlessness” — a force he described as “a key feature of our politics over the last decade.”
Plumb’s analysis showed that in the 2024 general election, support for Reform UK was higher in the 100 places in England with the biggest increases in persistent High Street vacancy, relative to the rest of the country. The finding built on earlier academic research from the universities of Warwick and Oxford and Imperial College London linking visible High Street decline to support for the UK Independence Party between 2009 and 2019.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage and Richard Tice were among the first mainstream politicians to regularly talk about visible signs of High Street criminality. In 2024, Farage said at an event: “You can see High Streets with five, six, seven barber shops in them.” Tice added: “Seriously, how come lots of these new barber shops have got no customers in them? How come they all want cash only? These are fronts for money laundering and drug money, and someone has to talk about it.”
The language around High Street decline has sparked debate. In January, Miatta Fahnbulleh, then the devolution, faith and communities minister, said she agreed with a characterization that the focus on Turkish barbers had racist overtones. “Yes, I do,” she told the Guardian. “The fundamentals aren’t to do with the colour of the skin of people running our High Streets. It’s to do with long-term decline and neglect.”
A Reform spokesman responded at the time, saying: “This is not a matter of ethnicity. The National Crime Agency itself has said many of these establishments are used as fronts for money laundering as well as a whole range of criminality which is why they carried out hundreds of raids on them last year.”
The investigation also documented immigration-related issues, including a Kurdish gang that enabled migrants to work illegally in mini-marts across Britain by offering to put their own names on official paperwork. Trading Standards officials told the BBC they find a constant supply of staff from asylum hotels, who are vulnerable to abuse by employers, working in those shops.
Oscar Selby, who researches troubled High Streets at the Centre for Cities think tank, described them as a “bellwether” for the wider economy. “High streets are ultimately… downstream of the broader economy’s performance,” he told the BBC. “The reason why people are so frustrated about High Streets is that people are also just annoyed that incomes have stagnated for the last 15 years. I think it all comes together in one package.”
Housing Secretary Steve Reed directly linked the state of High Streets to people’s faith in politics. “Each of the last four prime ministers have been the most unpopular ever and the reason for that is the public are very angry about the state of the economy, very angry about the state of our public services and very angry about what they see around them when they look at their High Streets and their hometown,” Reed told the BBC.
The government has announced a new High Street organised crime unit costing £30 million over three years. About two-thirds of that funding will go to the National Crime Agency, funding 75 officers. The remainder will go to Trading Standards, with a small amount allocated to tax and immigration authorities. The government has also ordered a “rapid review” of local responders’ powers, looking at whether Trading Standards should be able to close a potentially criminal shop for longer than the initial three months.
Glantz told the BBC he thinks the extra funding will make some difference but that £30 million over three years is not enough to make up for long-term cuts to police and Trading Standards budgets. He said a small number of highly visible raids, if shared widely on social media, could have a deterrent effect.
“There hasn’t been that visible community policing that might have in the past deterred these very obvious shops from springing up,” Glantz said.
Herriman, from the Chartered Trading Standards Institute, said for too long High Street organized crime was treated as a local problem rather than a national one. “Actually what it needs is some strategic direction from [national] government… because then you can start to coordinate across the country,” he said. Of the new funding, he said: “It is not job done, it is just job started.”