UK retailers have been told they need to take a longer-term view of the risks they face if they are to build the necessary resilience.

The call come from insurance broker Marsh which has released the results of its Retail Pulse 2026 Report, based on a survey of 350 senior UK retail executives.

The research found while the UK retail sector remains resilient after years of disruption caused by events such as supply chain, cyber, and weather-related risks, it risks building longer-term resilience by prioritising more immediate pressures such as protecting margins and managing rising employment costs.

The report added 93% of retail executives admitted they have faced significant disruption in the past year. In response, two in five have redirected long-term investment to cover short-term costs, highlighting a disconnect between spending and resilience. While 71% of respondents agreed that disruption is now a permanent feature of doing business, tactical measures remain largely in place: 47% are extending the life of ageing IT systems, 53% are accepting higher risk exposure to protect margins, and 30% are reducing operational flexibility.

Kelvyn Sampson, Retail, Leisure and Hospitality Industries leader at Marsh Risk UK, said: “UK retailers have spent years becoming better at fighting fires. The danger now is that constant firefighting has become the strategy.

“With disruption increasingly a permanent feature of doing business, retailers need to continue looking beyond the last crisis and ask whether their investment is making them more resilient to the next one. That means being more disciplined about where money is spent, bringing frontline and risk perspectives into decisions earlier, and measuring resilience by how well the business can anticipate, adapt and recover, not simply by how much it spends.”

According to the research, cyber is now the number one risk facing UK businesses (46%, up from 39% in 2024), yet only 5% of retail leaders say they feel protected from cyber incidents or exposure within their organisation. At the same time, 65% of retailers say they are spending excessive budgets while seeing poor returns across areas including workforce, technology and supply chain — suggesting that higher spending is not necessarily translating into greater resilience. That disconnect is particularly stark in cyber: nearly two-thirds (64%) of retailers hit by a major cyberattack last year also say they were overinvesting in cyber resilience.

The report also identifies a disconnect on staff safety: 85% of executives believe their business protects staff well, falling to 72% among HR leaders. Nearly nine in ten retail leaders (89%) do not rank staff wellbeing as a top challenge, despite violence and abuse against retail workers running at four times pre-pandemic levels.

The report calls on retailers to review where budgets are renewed by habit rather than evidence, involve frontline, HR and risk teams earlier in decisions that increase exposure, and judge cyber and resilience investment by speed of recovery rather than size of spend.

The report came as the British Retail Consortium called on the UK government to use this month’s budget to do more to restore consumer confidence.

Chief executive of the British Retail Consortium, Helen Dickinson, explained: “Consumer confidence in the economy stumbled after four months of improvement, with a similar trend for sentiment around personal finances. This decline was much sharper among women and with households bracing for a sharp rise in energy costs this winter, and bills rising faster than shop prices, it is little surprise that expectations of retail spending fell, even as overall spending plateaued.

“With the Budget looming large, consumers want to see government prioritise bringing down the cost of living. Retail will play its part, but the chancellor must not compound the triple blow from escalating employment costs, energy bills, and business rates, allowing retailers to focus on holding prices down. He should start by freezing the business rates multiplier, preventing yet another burdensome tax increase.”