Illegal High Street Enterprise. Closed for Business, Open for Crime

In May 2026, the Home Office announced the creation of a High Street Organised Crime Unit, pledging £30m over the next three years to clamp down on the criminal gangs abusing local business structures to launder money, evade tax, sell illegal goods and employ – or enslave – irregular migrants.

Investing in better enforcement is a much welcome and needed development to ensure the National Crime Agency (NCA) can disrupt the estimated £1bn flowing through high street fronts in the UK. But enforcement alone is unlikely to solve the problem at hand.

To truly combat criminality on our high streets, the structural conditions which have made British town centres so hospitable to such activity in the first place must be addressed, namely the serious deficiencies in local governance, planning and commercial tenancy frameworks that have allowed bad actors to hijack town centres across the country.

High Street Decline

The exploitation of cash-intensive businesses is nothing new, however, the decline of legitimate businesses on the UK’s high street over the last decade appears to be one of the main reasons for the increased visibility and presence of illegitimate businesses in local communities.

This culmination of factors has given rise to the widely held perception that, in the words of Rachael Herbert, the Director of the National Economic Crime Centre (NECC) ‘criminals have the run of the High Street’.

There are a number of reasons for the high number of store closures on the high street, with the rise of e-commerce and development of out-of-town shopping centres being central, accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic which led to many more people shopping online. It is estimated that one in seven retail units are currently closed and the Centre for Retail Research found that 37 shops per day closed in 2024, many of which were small independent retailers.

Recognising the damaging impact of these closures, successive governments have moved to introduce measures aimed at reducing the number of empty stores, and in so doing, have inadvertently deepened the vulnerability of the local communities they sought to help.

Losing Control Through Planning Reforms

The most consequential intervention was perhaps the introduction of 2020 local planning reforms, which intended to help struggling high streets adapt to changing consumer habits by merging separate categories of commercial use (for example, shops, offices, restaurants, gyms, etc.) under a single treatment: Class E. Where previously a bookshop would have needed planning permission to become a nail bar, changes of use within Class E do not constitute ‘development’ in planning terms, and the local authority need not even be notified.

In practice, these changes mean the decision over what opens on any given high street now rests in large part with private landlords acting on their commercial interests, rather than with local councils ostensibly acting on that of their communities’.

This is not to say that freeing commercial landlords to choose their tenants is itself the problem; indeed, with the correct safeguards, it can be an intelligent way to stimulate local economic development. However, against the backdrop of successive shocks and the proliferation of online shopping, many landlords have found it increasingly difficult to fill vacant high street lots. As such, with no legal obligation to scrutinise the nature of a prospective tenant’s business, and with a strong financial incentive to accept any paying occupant, landlords are not motivated under the current system to safeguard local communities from organised criminals taking advantage of Britain’s ease-of-business environment.

Much like discussing the weather, fussing over the local high street feels like a uniquely British pastime. However, the misuse of legitimate business by organised crime networks is a ubiquitous problem: in the EU, for example, an estimated 86% of the Union’s most threatening Organised Crime Groups (OCGs) are estimated to exploit legal businesses to further their own aims. In response, the EU has promoted what is called an ‘administrative approach’ to introduce friction and ensure authorities are not unintentionally complicit in facilitating the progression of criminal enterprise. At its core, the administrative approach is a prevention-oriented model which emphasises inter-agency collaboration and better use of local and public regulatory powers (licensing, planning, business registration, inspections, etc.) to block criminal factions from abusing the legitimate economy.

Application of the Administrative Approach

Across the channel, the administrative approach has been operationalised on both national and international levels. In the Netherlands, for example, the Bibob act gives local government agencies the power to conduct background checks and withdraw/refuse licenses, permits, subsidies and public contracts in instances where there is deemed to be a high risk of criminal activity. The Dutch have also established Regional Information and Expertise Centres to coordinate action between local government, police, prosecutors, and tax authorities to identify and disrupt the operations of OCGs throughout the country. In Belgium local authorities are also increasingly adopting the use of administrative techniques in the form of pre-emptive checks called enquêtes d'intégrité (integrity investigations) which aim to detect criminal infiltration of the legal economy and shut down businesses with criminal links.

At the EU level, the EMPACT (European Multidisciplinary Platform Against Criminal Threats) initiative coordinates joint action against serious and organised crime internationally. At the beginning of May 2026, EMPACT coordinated hugely successful ‘action days’ which joined law enforcement, health authorities, tax authorities, consumer protection bodies, labour inspectorates, customs, immigration services and local authorities from across the Union. As part of the drive, more than 4,400 businesses and industrial sites were inspected, resulting in fines of at least €496,000 and the seizure/confiscation of assets worth an estimated €3,000,000.

Belgium offers a further relevant case, particularly given concerns about organised crime around Antwerp and the exploitation of legitimate logistics and commercial infrastructure. Belgian debates on organised crime increasingly emphasise the need to combine law enforcement with administrative, municipal and regulatory tools, especially in sectors and locations where criminal groups depend on licences, premises, transport access, labour arrangements or local tolerance. The lesson for the UK is not that continental models can simply be imported wholesale, but that the fight against high-street criminality should not sit solely with national enforcement agencies. Local authorities, landlords, licensing bodies, tax authorities, labour inspectors and trading standards all control points of friction that organised crime currently exploits.

Translated to the British context, adopting such an ‘administrative’ approach would mean treating local planning, licensing, trading standards, tax compliance, labour inspection and commercial tenancy as part of the frontline response to organised crime.

A strengthened administrative approach could involve introducing a high-risk sub-category within Class E for business types deemed as most exposed to criminal activity, meaning local authorities would need to approve the changes of use for barbershops, vape shops, nail bars etc. It could mean placing ‘know your tenant’ obligations on commercial landlords, who are currently the de facto gatekeepers of the high street but face no statutory duty to scrutinise prospective occupants. It could mean funding local councils to maintain datasets which catalogue information on commercial occupancy to provide law enforcement and local authorities with the ability to identify patterns before an ‘eyesore of vape shops’ (a new collective noun perhaps?) is installed in their town centre.

None of these proposed measures would replace the much-needed work of the new unit, but each would make that work more likely to succeed. £30 million spent disrupting criminal operations on high streets whose structural conditions continue to invite them in is, to coin a phrase, £30 million spent upgrading the Titanic’s ballroom. The harder, yet far more impactful task, is to take action which ensures the high street is a less hospitable place for criminality to coalesce with the legitimate economy in the first place. Hopefully the recent announcement is the first step on a journey, not the final destination.

© RUSI, 2026.

The views expressed in this Commentary are the author's, and do not represent those of RUSI or any other institution.

For terms of use, see Website Terms and Conditions of Use.

Have an idea for a Commentary you'd like to write for us? Send a short pitch to commentaries@rusi.org and we'll get back to you if it fits into our research interests. View full guidelines for contributors.