Christopher Seddon has had to spend £9,600 to prove his arrest was a clear case of mistaken identity. But no one will accept responsibility for the nightmare

When Christopher Seddon popped into a Waitrose store last May on behalf of his housebound 89-year-old mother, he was only planning to buy a few items to get her through the week. After paying, he was stunned when two policemen seized and handcuffed him in front of watching shoppers. He was then forced to spend six hours in a cell at the local police station before being charged with stealing £102-worth of meat.

Over the next three months Seddon, a published author who lives in north London, says he spent £9,600 on legal fees and expert reports to prove that it was a case of mistaken identity and clear his name. Eventually the case against him was dropped, and Waitrose offered £500 to say sorry because he is a “valued customer” – but he says the incident has left him thousands of pounds out of pocket and he describes the way he was treated as “nothing short of scandalous”.

Seddon’s nightmare began when he made his twice-weekly visit to see his housebound mother who lives alone near the Waitrose store in Chesham, Bucks. Each week he shops for her, but as he left the store on that fateful Saturday afternoon he was confronted by two police officers. “They seized me, then handcuffed me with my arms behind my back, stating that they were arresting me on suspicion of shoplifting 17 days earlier, in spite of the fact that on that day I hadn’t even been in Chesham. The security guard thrust a mobile phone in my face [with a CCTV still on it] and screamed ‘do you deny this is you?’ at me. All this was going on in front of dozens of shoppers.”

He says he was not allowed to call his mother, who he knew would be distressed when he inexplicably failed to return. He was held at Aylesbury police station for more than six hours.

“Despite the nightmare of the situation I assumed that I could clear up what was obviously a case of mistaken identity – but I was wrong. When I was eventually questioned, I was shown CCTV footage from the afternoon of 11 May showing a bald male aged about 60 concealing £100 of meat products in a bag and leaving without paying. I was told that I had been identified as the offender by the security guard from a CCTV still he had downloaded to his mobile. But on that day I was working on a book at my north London flat and, ironically, visited the Waitrose store on the Holloway Road.”

I thought Waitrose would be horrified by what had happened and offer me compensation ... it offered me a derisory £500

In a statement given to the police after Seddon’s arrest, the security guard claimed Seddon had also visited the Chesham store just a few days earlier and become nervous when he saw he was being watched. He said he then saw Seddon run from the store.

Seddon believes the police were greatly influenced by this claim. He says the CCTV evidence, not available at the time of his arrest, shows that while he was in the store at that time, it did not show him running away.

“I had come into the store for a bacon and egg sandwich for lunch, saw that there were none on the shelves and decided to go to Sainsbury’s instead. I left at a normal pace and never noticed the security guard. I even complained about the lack of bacon and egg sandwiches on Twitter. But the police believed the security guard’s account of me running from the store, as well as his claim that I was the man shown on CCTV stealing meat products, and charged me with the earlier theft.”

As a result, Seddon says he was forced to hire first a solicitor and then a barrister at a cost of £6,000 plus VAT. Knowing that he had been in London when the theft took place, but living alone, he had to employ a mobile phone expert to provide evidence to that effect. He also employed a CCTV specialist, John Kennedy, who made his name in the Jamie Bulger case in which CCTV footage was central to the conviction of the boys who abducted him.

Kennedy’s report states clearly that Seddon was not the person who had stolen the meat, and that the security guard’s claim that Seddon had run from the store was not true. It lists several key differences in the look of the two men, and even notes that their jackets were of different colours, contrary to what the guard told police. The expert report suggested that the photo of the thief on the security guard’s mobile phone was distorted in the act of downloading it. The image was compressed and the aspect ratio changed as a result, it said.

After Seddon had paid for all this, the case was dropped the day before it was due to be heard at High Wycombe magistrates court on the instruction of the Crown Prosecution Service. But Seddon says he has since been told by his solicitor that he will recoup no more than 20%-30% of his costs, leaving him substantially out of pocket. “Having cleared my name I approached Waitrose with my expert report, naively thinking that it would be horrified by what had happened and would offer me compensation for the inconvenience, distress and financial loss, as well as take urgent steps to ensure that such an incident could not be repeated,” he says.

Instead, he says the supermarket spent two months fobbing him off before concluding that its security guard had done nothing wrong.

“They offered me a derisory £500 as a ‘goodwill’ gesture to a ‘valued customer’. Their emails throughout were headed ‘Waitrose customer feedback’ as if the whole affair was of no more consequence than an unsatisfactory purchase from the bakery. If a security guard cannot distinguish between running and walking then it is a matter of significant public concern that they continue to be employed as a security guard,” he says.

A spokesman for Waitrose declined to offer an explanation as to what had happened. Instead, he pointed us towards Thames Valley police. “We are very sorry to hear of the distress Mr Seddon has experienced. You will need to speak to the Thames Valley police press office about the decisions taken. We are continuing our conversations with Mr Seddon and the third-party security company with whom we work so, as you will appreciate, it would not be appropriate for us to comment further at this stage.”

If Waitrose will not accept responsibility, then sooner or later it will happen again to somebody else

Seddon says questions remain as to why he was treated so badly. At a meeting last week with Thames Valley police, which is still investigating his complaint against the force, Seddon says he was told by a long-serving officer that he had not ever heard of a comparable incident.

Seddon is still furious at his treatment at the hand of the store, and is considering legal action. “If Waitrose will not accept responsibility, then sooner or later it will happen again to somebody else. For my part, I would have been better off accepting a police caution for a crime that I did not commit and paying Waitrose for £100 of meat products that somebody else stole. It is morally repugnant that I should be left thousands of pounds out of pocket when I have done nothing wrong,” he says.

Thames Valley Police said that as it had received a complaint in relation to this investigation it would be inappropriate to comment further.

A barrister’s view

Christopher Seddon’s treatment at the hands of both Waitrose and the police shows a gap in the law: a completely innocent person can be arrested and prosecuted and may not be entitled to any compensation, not even all of his legal costs, writes barrister Richard Colbey.

When police make an arrest they are not liable for the consequences if they act on reasonable suspicion. There are sound public policy reasons why they should be free to do their job without worrying too much about the consequences, so long as they behave reasonably.



Here the report by the security staff gave them that suspicion and meant they were duty-bound to question Seddon, and entitled to arrest him. Marching him away in handcuffs was unnecessary and apparently deplored by a more mature police officer, but it was not unlawful.

Had the security guard effected the arrest the situation would have been different. There is not the same public interest in “citizens’ arrests”, and civilians have no protection if they arrest an innocent person, however reasonable the suspicion.

In 1992 a Marina Davidson was accused, wrongly, of stealing from Woolworths in Bangor. The court of appeal said that a security guard, and hence a Woolworths employee, could only be liable for an arrest if it was effected by the police – ie, if they had given some direction or made a direct request or encouragement that the arrest should be made. There the court of appeal decided that the store detective had merely made a report – but the guard in Seddon’s­ case may have overstepped the mark.



Also it is possible that Seddon could claim slander, but that is a notoriously difficult and expensive cause of action. He would have to show the guard acted maliciously as, otherwise, what the guard said to the police would be privileged and also that he suffered “serious harm” – a somewhat vague statutory hurdle introduced in 2014 to discourage the proliferation of defamation claims.

A person acquitted of a crime will usually be able to recover his costs from public funds, but only at fairly derisory legal aid rates. These will be nothing like £10,000 even for a trial that goes ahead, and are typically hundreds, rather than thousands, of pounds.



The Law Society advises solicitors to warn clients where they are incurring costs that are unlikely to be recoverable, and if Seddon’s solicitors had not given such advice then it could have taken a hit on much of the difference between its bill and the amount recovered.

• Update: Christopher Seddon has confirmed that his solicitors did advise him that he may not be able to recover all his legal costs of defending himself. The barrister’s view was amended on 28 November 2016 to clarify this point.