Consultations – Hinterland

Councils allowed to relax Sunday trade laws to promote ‘thriving high streets’

Ivan Annibal — Wed, 05 Aug 2015 16:41:19 +0000

This piece sets out Government plans to allow high streets to “grow and thrive”. Councils could be given powers to zone areas where Sunday trading laws could be relaxed. The changes would mean that a local council could declare that shops on a designated high street could operate under more relaxed hours while out-of-town shopping centres with fewer local ties could face restrictions. The move has been welcomed by Mr Douglas-Davies, chief executive of Hillview Garden Centres Ltd: “Our customers want to be able to shop on a Sunday at a time that suits them and their lifestyle. At both ends of the day we have to deal with frustrated visitors at all of our centres. In the morning the ‘early-birds’ want to get on with the gardening and later in the day, visitors are forced to leave the centre at a time that feels like it is only mid-afternoon. Sunday is by far and away the busiest day of the week – this demonstrates that customers want to shop on Sundays”. However, James Lowman, the chief executive of the Association of Convenience Stores, whose members could now face competition from larger stores, states “the current Sunday Trading rules are a popular compromise that provide a small but important advantage for small shops. We know from the Sunday Trading experiment during the Olympic Games that longer opening hours on a Sunday only results in trade being diverted from smaller stores to larger stores, with no overall benefit in sales to the UK economy”. This week the Department for Communities and Local Government (CLG) launched a Consultation on the matter. According to Communities Minister Communities Minister Brandon Lewis: “this Government is determined to devolve powers previously held in Whitehall to local people. That’s why we want to give local leaders the power to decide whether Sunday trading is right for their area, and to give their retailers the option to stay open for longer. We have already taken a range of measures to boost the Great British high street and now we are giving local areas another tool to encourage shoppers to the town centre and get shops to grow and thrive”. As well as making the ‘case for change’, the Consultation Document contains ‘devolution’ options: giving the decision making power to ‘metro mayors’ or Local Authorities more generally? While local decision making can be viewed as a good thing, how can we ensure rural areas are not omitted from the debate and that devolution is not used by central Government to abdicate its responsibility for pursuing economic development across the UK? The Consultation closes on 16 September 2015.

Public Sector Efficiency Challenge launched

Ivan Annibal — Wed, 05 Aug 2015 16:34:52 +0000

Following the launch of Spending Review 2015, the Government is asking public sector workers to provide ideas on how things could be done better or more efficiently. This week the Chancellor and Chief Secretary have been promoting a ‘Public Sector Efficiency Challenge’. In an open letter, the Government calls upon public sector workers to identify savings in government departments. The letter reads: You do an incredible job, day in, day out…You know better than most where we can take the next steps. You know first-hand where things are working well on the frontline of public services, but also where the waste is and where we can provide better services for less money. You know where we can go further to reform our public services and where we can devolve more power so that local people have more control and local leaders are more accountable’. The Treasury and Cabinet Office have created an online survey – with responses requested by 4 September. A similar exercise in 2010 led to the reduction in the need for multiple Criminal Records Bureau checks by making greater use of electronic access for employers and stopping the distribution of National Insurance numbers to people with a plastic card. In June 2015 the Clockoff Survey received 3,700 responses from people in jobs ranging from social work to police and probation and from social housing to the NHS and charities. The picture that emerges is one where staff are already working long hours with few breaks – 93% of respondents were stressed at work either some or all of the time; and on average respondents put in an extra seven hours a week. With the Treasury’s/Cabinet Office’s survey, it will be interesting to see if/how the public sector can continue to ‘do more with less’.

Postal service competition inquiry launched by MPs

Ivan Annibal — Wed, 24 Sep 2014 17:38:11 +0000

In response to complaints from Royal Mail which says it is facing unfair competition from rival firms, the Business, Innovation and Skills Commons Select Committee has announced an inquiry into how competition is affecting Royal Mail’s obligation to provide a universal service. The inquiry will consider access and end to end delivery of mail, parcel delivery services and the impact of competition on the Universal Service Obligation (USO). Ofcom, the postal services regulator, through the Postal Services Act 2011, sets out the minimum requirements of the USO which includes – at least one delivery of letters every Monday to Saturday to every address in the UK, at least one collection of letters from Monday to Saturday from every access point in the UK, and postal services at an affordable and uniform tariff across the UK. Although privatised in 2013, Royal Mail claims it competitors can “cherry-pick” easy-to-serve urban areas that are more profitable than rural areas, and choose to deliver easy-to-process mail. In practice this means Royal Mail has to subsidise more expensive deliveries in rural areas from the profits it makes from deliveries in urban areas. As a high volume user of the post office and Royal Mail, I am left wondering if regular postal deliveries to rural communities and businesses soon become a thing of the past leaving thousands of people isolated. The deadline for submitting written evidence to the Select Committee inquiry is Friday 24 October 2014.