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Count the Barbershops in Your Town. Then Ask Who Pays for Them
— 5 mins read
A business that opens where there is no demand, and stays open, is often being paid by something other than its customers.
In April this year, officers from the Metropolitan Police spent a week working Kilburn High Road. They made 45 arrests, seized 74 vehicles and recovered 1,161 suspected stolen mobile phones from a single shop. At a barbershop on the same road, an off-duty officer watched two men walk in. Police followed and recovered two machetes, each more than 50 centimetres long. Both men were arrested.
The Met did not describe that barbershop as a money laundering front, and there is no evidence that it was one. The point is narrower and still worth making: a barbershop is a premises, and premises are useful. What makes that worth examining is how many of them there now are, and where.
The maths does not work
You have probably noticed this yourself, or know someone who has. A market town where three or four barbershops have opened inside a couple of years, two of them within sight of each other. Restaurants are a different case, because a town can absorb an Italian, a curry house and a burger place without strain; they are not selling the same thing to the same person. Barbershops sell one service, at much the same price, to the same customers, who need it roughly once a month.
The numbers bear the impression out. Barbershops per 10,000 people in Britain more than doubled between 2013 and 2023, from 1.4 to 3.1. Estimates of the national total run from 18,000 to 30,000. In Essex and Doncaster, numbers rose by 200 per cent in five years. Porth, in the Rhondda, has fewer than 6,000 residents and fourteen barbershops.
Fourteen. In a town where a generously estimated total market might be a few hundred haircuts a week, split between them.
This is happening while the rest of the sector contracts. The Office for National Statistics counted 50,400 hairdressing and beauty businesses in the UK in 2025, and traditional hairdressers have been closing for years. Barbershops, nail bars and vape shops go the other way, and they go that way in towns with falling footfall, rising rents and boarded-up units either side. A business that opens where there is no demand, and stays open, is often being paid by something other than its customers.
A business that opens where there is no demand, and stays open, is often being paid by something other than its customers.
What the sign on the door actually means
They are commonly called Turkish barbershops, and the label is the first thing to set aside. It describes a style of service rather than a statement of ownership. Reporting on the sector has found that operators linked to criminality frequently come from Albania, Iraq and Iran, and that the Turkish branding is applied because it sells, not because it describes who holds the lease.
That matters for two reasons. It means the shorthand everyone uses is inaccurate. And it means anyone trying to follow the ownership by reading the shopfront is being misdirected by design.
A named case
Hewa Rahimpur is an Iranian Kurd who ran a barbershop in London. He was also at the centre of one of the largest people-smuggling networks to operate across the Channel. A Belgian court jailed him for eleven years in October 2024, over an operation linked to the movement of around 10,000 people into Britain by small boat.
The state knows, and has counted
The National Crime Agency has now run two national operations against exactly this. Operation Machinize in spring 2025 went into 380 premises and made 35 arrests. Operation Machinize 2, in October 2025, visited 2,734 premises, made 924 arrests and seized £10.7 million in suspected criminal proceeds. The NCA linked the businesses to drug trafficking, organised immigration crime, modern slavery, human trafficking and firearms offences.
In the same announcement, the agency estimated that £12 billion of criminal cash is generated in Britain each year. The largest operation of its kind in British history, involving every police force in the country, recovered a sum equal to under a tenth of one per cent of the annual flow. Those two numbers measure different things, and the comparison is still damning.
Who is behind the chair?
There is a documented employment dimension, and it comes from the operations themselves. During the first Machinize operation, 55 people were questioned about their immigration status and 97 were safeguarded as potential victims of modern slavery. During the second, teams issued 341 referral notices for illegal working and renting.
That last figure deserves care. Not everyone working illegally in these premises is a participant in the fraud. The NCA's own findings place modern slavery and human trafficking alongside money laundering in the same businesses, which means some of the people behind the chairs are closer to being the product than the proprietor.
Why almost nobody gets caught
Kathryn Westmore of the Royal United Services Institute has set out the problem plainly. Invoices and ledgers are easy to produce, so a business can look legitimate on paper without difficulty. Shops close and reopen after expensive refurbishments, washing money through inflated building costs. And short of sitting outside a shop and counting the customers going in against the revenue being declared, the authorities have no practical way of telling a real business from a fake one.
Ask yourself how many barbershops you have watched close, sit empty behind whitewashed windows for a few weeks, then reopen under a new name with an expensive new fit-out. Westmore's point is that the refurbishment is not incidental to the business. It may be the business. The evidence that would convict is a tally of haircuts. No agency in Britain is resourced to collect it.
The evidence that would convict is a tally of haircuts. No agency in Britain is resourced to collect it.
Who this is actually being done to
Four in five hair and beauty businesses in Britain employ fewer than five people. They are sole traders and family firms, and a great many of them are run by people from the same communities as the shops being raided.
They are the ones losing. A barber who declares his takings and pays his tax cannot compete with a premises whose rent was never earned in the chair, because his competitor does not need to make a profit. Every fraudulent shop that opens makes an honest one less viable. That is how you end up with fourteen barbershops in Porth and a high street that offers very little else.
