I can speak only for the Co-op. Although we are a relatively big business, we are a small-format business, which is a slightly different thing. Also, we do wholesale to lots of family-owned independent stores and independent co-operative societies, such as Scotmid.
In the past three years, we have spent about £140 million UK-wide, and we will do that in the coming three years, too. About £20 million of that was spent in our Scottish stores. That spending is on a few things: physical stuff, guards and the design of stores, which involves issues such as where you put stuff.
One of the most important things that we have done concerns the use of technology to connect colleagues on the shop floor. Sometimes, there will be three or four colleagues in the store—one in the back, one on the till and one on the floor, and so on. All our colleagues have headsets, which means that they can speak to each other at any point, which is important. We have also connected our colleagues to a central control room, which is provided by a private supplier. That enables them to be connected to the outside world. If there is an incident and they press the alarm button, that store is taken over by the central control function, and the control room gathers the evidence to send to the police, instructs the colleagues what to do and sends out announcements.
You need to spend money. A big business such as the Co-op can afford to spend the equivalent of £8,000 a year, on average, on security measures in a store, but my worry is that many of the most at-risk stores—the small, family-run independents—do not have that resource. We are at risk because of our format: our stores are small, local and community based. The equivalent family-run businesses might not have the same kind of money to spend, which means that they will be most at risk.