From Incident Reporting to Intelligence-Led Crime Prevention: The Evolution of the B&Q Crime Centre

Summary

Retail crime in the UK has grown more organised, more mobile, and more violent. B&Q, the UK’s largest home improvement retailer, knew the old model wasn’t working. The question wasn’t whether to change. It was how.

The answer was the B&Q Crime & Intelligence Centre. Built in partnership with Zinc, it combines criminology-trained professionals with a purpose-built incident and case management platform. Today, this multi-award-winning centre is the backbone of B&Q’s security and loss prevention strategy. It delivers year-on-year return on investment.

341 organised crime groups tracked. 42 dismantled in a single year. 48 years of custodial sentences secured in 2025. A 90% police reporting rate. These aren’t incremental improvements. This is a new standard for the industry.

The Challenge

B&Q operates a nationwide estate of stores and distribution sites, serving millions of customers each week. That scale brings exposure. And the retail crime landscape had shifted dramatically.

Organised Crime Groups (OCGs) had become more sophisticated. They operate across multiple retailers and regions simultaneously. They use coordinated roles and surveillance techniques. They exploit gaps in how incidents are reported, evidenced, and escalated. Traditional loss prevention, built on guarding and reactive reporting, was no longer fit for purpose.

B&Q’s specific challenges included:

• Fragmented, inconsistent incident data with no central intelligence picture
• Incidents were only being reported by locations with security guards
• Crime intelligence embedded within third-party guarding contracts, limiting independent analysis
• No capability to identify patterns, networks, or organised crime group activity at scale
• Slow, inconsistent engagement with the police that reduced the likelihood of enforcement action
• A purely reactive posture that could not anticipate or disrupt evolving offender behaviour

The core problem wasn’t a shortage of incident reports. It was a failure to turn volume into intelligence, and intelligence into action.

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The Solution: A Centralised Crime & Intelligence Centre

Working with B&Q, Zinc built a centralised Crime & Intelligence Centre. Hosted at Zinc HQ, staffed by specialists, and powered by a purpose-built platform designed for intelligence-led crime prevention.

This wasn’t a technology implementation with people attached. It was a people-first intelligence model, with technology built to support and grow with it.

A People-First Intelligence Model

The Crime Centre is staffed by professionals chosen for specific expertise:

• Crime and intelligence analysts trained to identify patterns, behaviours, and networks
• Investigators experienced in organised retail crime and multi-site offending
• Engagement Officers focused on reporting quality, store adoption, and frontline capability
• Graduates from criminology and policing disciplines, including the University of Northampton
• Data scientists and technologists to drive innovation and continuous improvement

This criminology-led approach means no incident is treated in isolation. Every report is interpreted through an offender-centric lens. Building a picture of how individuals and groups operate, how they communicate, and how they can be disrupted.

Technology That Evolves With the Threat

At the heart of the Crime Centre is the Zinc platform. Not a static system. A living capability that evolves alongside B&Q’s operational needs and the changing retail risk landscape.

The platform provides:

• Incident reporting across the entire estate and frontline teams (3rd party security & colleagues)
• Automated triage, alerts, and escalation workflows
• Case intelligence and aggregation of multiple data sets 
• Police-ready evidence packs 
• Secure data sharing with law enforcement and intelligence partners like Opal
• Seamless integration with HALOS body-worn cameras, CCTV, and external intelligence networks
• Advanced business intelligence and custom analysis

Connected and highly configured – Zinc’s open, API-led architecture means the Crime Centre runs as a single connected operation, not a collection of isolated tools. The platform is aligned with law enforcement standards. Records, evidence, and intelligence can be shared quickly and consistently, cutting the friction that has historically slowed police case handling.

Rapid product development – The platform is driven by frontline intelligence, not assumptions. A continuous feedback loop between the Crime Centre team, B&Q stakeholders, and Zinc’s product specialists means that as offender tactics shift, policing requirements change, and new risks emerge, workflows and automation are updated to reflect real operational demand.

AI roadmap – AI capabilities are integrated to support earlier identification of organised crime activity and developing threats. Advanced data analysis and summarisation speeds up the processing of large datasets and supports predictive insight.

Evolving the platform ‘together’ – The B&Q Crime Centre team didn’t just adopt the platform. They helped build it. Working closely with Zinc, the team co-developed the case management module from the ground up, ensuring it was genuinely fit for purpose in a retail environment. Their expertise shaped how the module works in practice. Their input was instrumental in making it a tool that reflects real operational need, not a generic off-the-shelf product.

Collaboration Beyond B&Q

The Crime Centre doesn’t operate in isolation. Zinc works closely with Opal and police forces to share intelligence that supports the identification of prolific offenders and organised crime groups. A broader intelligence picture enables earlier disruption and more effective enforcement, protecting not just B&Q but the wider retail sectors.

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Implementation

Successful implementation required both technical onboarding and real cultural change. Zinc led the rollout across the estate, establishing the operational and evidential foundations the Crime Centre depends on:

• Configuring incident reporting, triage, and investigation workflows tailored to B&Q’s estate
• Introducing mobile-first reporting to improve accuracy, speed, and evidential quality at the point of capture
• Training store teams and security partners on evidential standards and reporting best practice
• Establishing collaborative triage protocols involving analysts and investigators
• Integrating body-worn camera footage and CCTV evidence into case management workflows
• Building automated reporting for daily incident reports (DIRs) and serious incident reports (SIRs)

From the outset, engagement was critical. Reporting quality doesn’t improve by mandate. It improves through structured education, feedback loops, and a visible connection between good reporting and real outcomes. As quality increased, the Crime Centre moved rapidly from reactive response to proactive intelligence development.

Take a deeper dive into change management at B&Q

Find out how the switch was managed with users: The importance of user engagement

The Results

The Crime Centre now handles an average of 3,000 incidents per month. The cumulative impact is measurable, sustained, and significant.

Figures correct as of Dec 2025

Intelligence-Led Operations in Practice

The numbers reflect a broader operational capability. High-profile operations targeting organised crime groups, including multi-year offending networks operating across more than 100 stores, show what becomes possible when intelligence is centralised, evidence is consistent, and police engagement is systematic.

These are not isolated successes. They are the product of a model designed to disrupt, not just record.

B&Q Crime Centre & Met Police Collaboration

Read more on how a cross-border investigation brought a prolific offender to justice

Recognised Excellence

The Crime Centre’s work has been recognised across the industry. In 2025 alone, the team won the ‘BSIA Regional Award’ for the Midlands and took ‘Security Manager of the Year’ at the Security and Fire Excellence Awards. In 2026, they continued with ‘Best Female Security Professional’ at the OSPAS.

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Why This Matters: Retail Crime Intelligence, Redefined

The B&Q Crime Centre marks a fundamental shift in how retail crime prevention can and should work.

The traditional model relied on guards, reactive reporting, and disconnected systems. Every incident was treated as a discrete event, with little ability to see the patterns, networks, and behaviours connecting them. That model is no longer sufficient for the scale and sophistication of organised retail crime today.

What the Crime Centre has proven is that when you apply the same intelligence principles used in law enforcement, analytical rigour, offender profiling, cross-agency collaboration, and continuous learning, to retail, the results are transformative.

What makes this model distinctive is the fusion of people and technology:

• Police-aligned records that reduce friction, accelerate justice, and act as a genuine deterrent
• Criminology-trained professionals who interpret data rather than simply collecting it
• Systems designed to support intelligence workflows, not generic reporting
• Shared intelligence that looks beyond individual incidents or individual retailers

This is not loss prevention evolved. It is retail crime intelligence redefined.

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“The B&Q Crime Centre leads how we accurately gather information on crime and security issues across the UK. The team understands their role and how they support B&Q, our security partners, and law enforcement to keep our stores safe.”

Simon Moss, Head of Security, B&Q

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The Future

The Crime Centre isn’t standing still. The partnership between B&Q and Zinc continues to drive the platform forward, shaped by operational experience and an evolving threat landscape.

AI integration – AI capabilities are being embedded across the platform to support earlier identification of organised crime activity. From flagging emerging offender patterns to surfacing developing threats before they escalate, AI will extend the analytical reach of the Crime Centre team, helping them act on intelligence faster and with greater precision.

Case automations – Manual case management tasks take time that analysts could spend on intelligence work. Targeted automations will reduce that burden, streamlining routine workflows, accelerating case progression, and ensuring investigators can focus on the decisions that matter most.

Threat intelligence – The Crime Centre will expand its strategic threat intelligence capability, moving beyond reactive case handling to proactive identification of emerging organised crime activity. Closer integration with law enforcement intelligence networks will ensure B&Q is always ahead of the threat, not responding to it.

Customised location risk profiles – No two stores face the same risk. The next phase of development will deliver dynamic, location-specific risk profiles, giving the Crime Centre and B&Q stakeholders a precise picture of vulnerability at site level. Smarter resource deployment. Earlier intervention. Better outcomes.

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Modules B&Q Use

• Incident Management
• Case Management
• Tasks & Procedures
• Data Analytics & Reporting
• Artificial Intelligence