Victims suffer not only physical injury but also psychological effects, such as anxiety and stress. A 2019 report by City, University of London, said rising violent retail crime was causing “long-lasting anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder”.

The risk of violence must be eliminated or reduced in the same way as any other possible cause of harm in the workplace, such as lifting heavy loads. Key to doing this is carrying out a risk assessment, as this will help to determine whether violence or aggression is a problem for your staff and business, and how matters can be improved. The assessment will also enable you to produce a policy and procedure for dealing with such matters and should form part of your wider health and safety policy.

Having considered and assessed the risk of in-store violence and aggression, you should have policies, measures and training in place that aim to minimise that risk to as low a level as is reasonably practicable. This means balancing the time, cost and effort involved in implementing a safety measure against the level of risk posed. Only if the former grossly outweighs the latter would you be justified in not taking that step (and even then, you would be expected to reduce risk using other, more proportionate controls).

Your risk assessment should of course have been updated following the government’s COVID-19 secure requirements, taking into account the increased risk of violence and aggression to staff.