Is stealing a sandwich really a sackable offence?

Tune into the news and you might reasonably believe that parts of Britain are in the grip of a crime and disorder epidemic. Our nation’s youth seem to believe a moral compass is something you can steal from Lush.

But how pure are your own ethics? Have you ever stolen a pen from your office? Sure, you never set alight a police van in order to break down the stationery cupboard door, but is it really all that different? “It starts with a few Biros, but then it becomes something bigger,” Peter Taylor, a fraud investigator and consultant told The Telegraph last week in an interview about the boom in workplace theft.

Zurich, the insurance company, put in a freedom of information request to police forces and discovered that 5,198 workers had been caught stealing from their employers in 2023. This was a slight dip on the year before, but was a 14 per cent increase on 2021. The insurance company also has received claims from companies, including a £150,000 theft by a ring of employees at a food manufacturer and a £50,000 claim from a double-glazing firm defrauded by its finance manager.

Did this double-glazing exec really start his life of crime by nicking a few ballpoint pens? If so, then Britain has a real problem on its hands. A recent survey suggested that 38 per cent of British workers had taken pens or pencils from their office (guilty as charged), 22 per cent had stolen notepads (yes, those too), while 18 per cent had taken a pack or two of printer paper home (no, but only because a box of A4 is quite hard to slip into your pocket).

If I had been caught at the time, I’m fairly certain I would have been outraged that anyone had dared question my behaviour. After all, few people can square their own questionable morals while passing judgment on others’ like a journalist.

About a decade ago, when I joined a new department at a national newspaper, an old hand welcomed me warmly and then leant in to ask: “How much are you putting through on expenses each month?” I answered that it was something like £50 to £100, to which he looked appalled and told me that this figure was far too low. I explained that I just didn’t travel that often and that I met most of my contacts for a quick coffee. “You need to get that up,” he said conspiratorially, “otherwise you’ll be letting the side down.” I was genuinely shocked that he thought claiming as much as £1,000 a month in expenses, only some of which were legitimate, as one of the perks of the job.

There is clearly a difference between systematically defrauding your employer and pocketing the odd (okay, quite a few) cheap pens. Employers, however, appear to struggle to see the difference. In the past year, there have been two notable cases of employees being dismissed for stealing, both of which have shone a light on the corporate world’s attitude towards transgression.

The first involved Niamke Doffou, a worker at an Essex branch of Sainsbury’s, who, at the end of a night shift, bought £30 of goods from his own company. However, he was caught on CCTV taking (and not paying for) multiple bags for life. The worker, who had been with the supermarket for nearly 20 years, claimed he was tired and had just forgot to press the right button at the self-scan till. The employment tribunal sided with Sainsbury’s, which claimed the CCTV footage proved he had “acted dishonestly” and had “committed theft”.

The second case was of Gabriela Rodriguez, working for Total Clean, a cleaning agency, one of whose clients was a City law firm called Devonshires. She was accused of taking a single tuna and cucumber sandwich wedge, the value of which was estimated at £1.50, from the law firm’s kitchen. She argued that it was common and accepted practice for workers to help themselves to the food that had been left over in meeting rooms. Total Clean claimed they were not leftovers and that her eating of the sarnie constituted “theft/misappropriation of client property”. Despite apologising and offering to repay the value of the sandwich, she lost her job.

After a blaze of publicity, she was (some months later) offered her job back. She decided she’d prefer to take Total Clean and Devonshires to court for unfair dismissal, arguing in an interview this month: “As workers we need to think collectively, act collectively and assert our power. Because otherwise we’ll get trampled on everywhere.”

Do we really want UK plc to be sacking workers for taking £1.50 sandwiches or a couple of 60p bags for life? The law matters, of course it does, and the companies involved would argue that they were merely following the letter of the law and their own internal codes of conduct. But increasingly companies spend far longer writing long, worthy “codes of ethics” rather than simply employing some common sense. Most of these codes are full of meaningless guff about respecting human rights, although one has a usefully simple bit of advice: Centrica’s code of ethics says that if any of its workers or contractors are in doubt about a decision, they should ask: “How would it look printed in a newspaper?”

Well, in both these cases it looks, in my view, far worse for the employer than for the employee. Neither of these cases would have ended up in an industrial tribunal if the companies had employed a thoughtful manager able to handle a sensitive situation. And though these two cases are different, they are symptomatic of a corporate world that finds it easier to axe workers that it finds troublesome, and to hire replacements, than it is to spend the time training the existing workforce and making them feel valued.

Harry Wallop is a consumer journalist and broadcaster. Follow him on X @hwallop