sunday trading

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.