Let Sunday Trade: The Case Against the Six-Hour Rule
There is a peculiar magic in British regulation whereby a shop of 279 square metres may open all day on a Sunday, while its neighbour, four square metres larger, must close its doors after six hours. No principle of theology, economics, or common sense explains the difference. Only the accretion of a compromise struck in 1994, which nobody now defends on its merits and many politicians nonetheless find it too much trouble to remove.
That, in miniature, is the state of Sunday trading law in England and Wales. Scotland has no such restriction at all, and has suffered no discernible plague of moral collapse as a result. Small shops in England have none either, and have not brought down civilization. It is only the large shop, the one, incidentally, best placed to employ people, to invest in premises, and to pay decent wages, that is told by statute how many hours of the week it may serve its own customers.
The case for liberalising Sunday trading is not complicated, which may be why it is so rarely made plainly. It runs like this: a shopkeeper who wishes to open on Sunday, and a shopper who wishes to buy something on Sunday, and a shop assistant willing to work on Sunday for an agreed wage, are three consenting adults engaged in an entirely voluntary transaction that harms no one else. The state's role in this transaction is, on any classical liberal accounting, precisely nil.
Against this, the objections tend to arrive dressed as concern for shop workers rather than distaste for commerce, which is itself instructive. Nobody now argues, in public at least, that Sunday trading corrupts the shopper. The argument has retreated to the claim that it burdens the worker.
USDAW's opposition is sincere, and ought to be met honestly rather than waved away. But the protections it seeks, the right to refuse Sunday work without detriment, already present in the 1994 Act, do not require capping how long a willing worker may work. That is a different regulation entirely, aimed not at protecting the reluctant but at rationing the willing.
The strangest feature of the current law is not that it restricts Sunday trading -reasonable people can and did disagree about that in 1994 - but that it restricts it selectively, by floor space. A large supermarket faces a six-hour cap, but the convenience store across the road, owned by the same chain, trading under the same brand, does not. This is not a policy. It is an accident that has calcified into a policy, and it survives mainly because nobody has yet found the political energy to ask why a threshold designed for a different decade's retail landscape should still be governing an era of online delivery slots and a Sunday brunch culture.
Repeal need not be dramatic. The simplest reform is also the most honest: extend to large shops the freedom already extended to small ones. No new bureaucracy, no local variation to police, no devolved patchwork of hours that turns a trip across a council boundary into a small adventure in regulatory archaeology, just parity. If six-hour Sundays were essential to national wellbeing, one might expect small shops trading all day to have produced some measurable social harm by now. They have not.
The 2016 attempt at reform failed, but that need not repeat. The last attempt collapsed under a coalition that had almost nothing else in common. There were Conservative backbenchers uneasy about the Sabbath, the DUP defending a distinctly Ulster sabbatarianism, Labour defending USDAW's members, and the SNP voting against a change that would not even have applied to Scotland, which already enjoys the liberalized regime in question.
A government inclined to try again would do well to separate the winnable argument from the unwinnable one. Devolving Sunday hours to local authorities revives the same objection that sank it before. It invites 650 separate lobbying fights instead of one, and gives every reluctant council a veto that a national repeal would not. The cleaner path is also the harder one politically, a straightforward national repeal of the six-hour cap, defended not as a technocratic tidying exercise but as what it actually is, the removal of an arbitrary size-based restriction on the freedom of consenting adults to trade.
Employment effects of the 1994 liberalization, and of comparable relaxations abroad, tend to run modestly positive rather than the predicted zero-sum reshuffling of trade from weekday to Sunday. Convenience has value, and extending the hours in which it can be supplied tends, unsurprisingly, to generate some activity that would not otherwise have occurred at all. None of this amounts to a claim that liberalization will transform the economy. It is the smaller and more honest claim that removing a restriction which currently serves no-one produces a small net gain and no measurable loss, which is more than can be said for a great many pieces of legislation that remain untouched for want of anyone willing to say so.
The case against, it should be said in fairness, rests less on economics than on an older and by no means contemptible instinct, that a society benefits from one day when commerce recedes and something else, sociability, rest, worship, is allowed room to breathe without being crowded out by shops. That is a real value, and those who hold it are not merely nostalgic. The reply is not that the value is wrong, but that the six-hour cap does almost nothing to protect it, since large shops already trade for a third of the day and small shops trade for all of it. If Sunday's distinct character is worth legislating for, this law is not the instrument doing that work.
Madsen Pirie