Britain's Great Petrol Station Getaway.

UK petrol theft, fuel drive-offs, rising petrol prices, shoplifting, retail crime and the cost-of-living squeeze are at the heart of this episode of Mark and Pete. Drivers are leaving filling stations without paying in growing numbers, retailers are reporting increasing theft across the board, and the obvious question is beginning to look rather difficult to avoid: why do so many petrol stations still let us take the fuel first and pay afterwards?Industry figures suggest fuel theft is now costing UK forecourts enormous sums, with incidents rising sharply as petrol and diesel prices have climbed. Some cases are organised and deliberate. Number plates may be obscured or false, vehicles filled and driven straight off. Others appear to involve first-time offenders, which makes the whole thing rather more interesting, and more troubling.Is this simply crime responding to opportunity? Or has the squeeze on household finances persuaded a small but growing number of otherwise ordinary people that stealing fifty or sixty pounds of petrol is somehow different from stealing fifty or sixty pounds from a till?It isn’t, of course. The eighth commandment remains admirably free of footnotes.We also ask why Britain has not moved much more decisively towards pay-before-you-pump systems. Plenty of filling stations already require a bank card to be authorised before fuel is dispensed, so technically it is hardly moon-landing stuff. Yet many forecourts still operate on trust, helped by CCTV, automatic number-plate recognition and the hope that the customer will wander inside and pay.And wandering inside is rather important, because modern petrol stations make plenty of money from coffee, sandwiches, sweets and assorted emergency purchases which somehow cost twice what they did before you entered the building.But fuel theft is only part of a much wider story.Shoplifting and retail crime have risen dramatically in Britain, with retailers reporting hundreds of thousands of offences, organised gangs targeting high-value goods and shop workers facing alarming levels of abuse and violence. Food, alcohol, cosmetics, meat, coffee, confectionery and other easily resold goods are increasingly attractive targets.So who is doing it? The answer appears to be a mixture: organised thieves, repeat offenders, opportunists and some people who may never previously have regarded themselves as criminals at all.This week we ask whether rising prices are merely exposing an old problem or creating a new one, whether retailers need to redesign the way we pay, and whether Britain has quietly become rather too casual about stealing.