If I Stole Something from My Local Supermarket, I’d Fully Expect to Be Arrested

If I stole something from my local supermarket, I’d fully expect to be arrested.
That’s how most of us think justice works.

So when fraud of nearly £500,000 hit my business (and more was still to follow), I thought calling the police would be straightforward.

When justice doesn’t work how you expect

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

👉 I phoned the police — no one called me back.
👉 I went to Redditch station — they told me to “report it online” via Action Fraud.
👉 I waited a month — silence.

The frustration of silence

It was surreal. If I’d walked out of Tesco with a bottle of wine, I’d have been in handcuffs in minutes. But when half a million pounds went missing from my company? Silence.

In the end, I wrote to three people:

• Sajid Javid, my local MP (who at the time was in the middle of a Conservative leadership race).

• [Add the other two if you want detail here — or leave it open-ended.]

It took persistence, frustration, and months of pushing before anything moved forward.

The stripped-back lesson? Justice isn’t always fair. Systems don’t always work the way you think they should.

The leadership lesson in persistence

But here’s the thing: you can’t give up. If something matters, you keep pushing until someone listens.

That’s what leadership often feels like too.
It’s not about easy wins or tidy processes.
It’s about persistence in the face of silence.