Retail Store Closure: Boxing Day

Andrew Smith Excerpts

Monday 12th December 2016 Westminster Hall

[Drew Hendry]

The petitioners are quite right to look to protect the rights of workers. We heard compelling words from the hon. Member for Warrington North about the pressures that the petitioners feel need to be addressed. I am of the opinion that holidays should be respected; for example, in Scotland, traditionally, on new year’s day, shops are closed. I am unsure how we could make that work across the business sector, for small businesses and large retailers, through legislation. I have described the moves by the Scottish Government to improve the working lives of workers across Scotland through a different approach to working with businesses and organisations. In Scotland, the proper living wage, which is higher than the living wage that the UK Government have stipulated, has been adopted by a great many businesses. Encouraging good behaviour by businesses, including retailers, can and does work when we can get the message of positive change across.

[Mr Andrew Smith (Oxford East) (Lab)]

I am interested in the hon. Gentleman’s answer to the question asked by the hon. Member for Kettering (Mr Hollobone). Am I right in thinking the Scottish Government do not favour stopping large stores from opening on Boxing day?

[Drew Hendry]

I have clearly given my own view: I see this as challenging. I do not think there has been a proposition from the Scottish Government on this issue, and I would not presume to speak for them, so I gave my own answer to the question.

The way forward needs to be innovative and to include a different approach from the Government. We should adopt a model whereby retailers in particular—but other businesses as well—are encouraged to act. I gave the example of the living wage being adopted at a much higher level in Scotland. The Scottish business pledge has been signed up to, and employers have been encouraged to provide much better working conditions for their employees. There is measurable evidence that when businesses adopt those practices—when they are more considerate towards their employees and introduce measures to improve the situation for employees—they see increased productivity, increased profit and better sustainability. Staff are more likely to be retained and to stick with those jobs, and to be able to achieve a more effective work-life balance. We are discussing Boxing day, but the core of the issue is surely not just one day in the year, no matter how important that day is, or how stressful people might find it to miss out on it. This must be about making working conditions better for people across the entire year, so that they can all benefit from a better work-life balance from the beginning of January through to the end of December.

--- Later in debate ---

[Bill Esterson]

The hon. Gentleman is nodding; so we both had grandparents who ran cornershops.

[Mr Andrew Smith]

You’re not cousins, are you?

[Bill Esterson]

I am struggling to make progress, Mrs Moon, because I am being given all sorts of interesting suggestions.

My grandad told me that if people cannot afford to pay decent wages, they should not open a shop. That is a good piece of advice about being a responsible employer. He might have amended that, in the context of this debate, to say that if employers cannot give decent time off over Christmas, they should not be opening a shop, especially on Christmas day and Boxing day. The hon. Member for Kettering is suggesting one option. Only 1.5% of the thousands of staff surveyed by USDAW said they wanted to work on Boxing day, so something needs to be done and it needs to be addressed. One option, undoubtedly, would be to amend the Christmas Day (Trading) Act 2004; another would be to have a Boxing day trading Act. I wait to see what the Minister has to say on that score. I suggest to the hon. Gentleman that if nothing is done through that piece of legislation, there should be action to ensure—this goes back to his earlier comments—that staff who do not want to work on Boxing day will not be under pressure to do so.

The hon. Gentleman reminded us that he voted against the Government’s attempt to include relaxation of Sunday trading in the Enterprise Bill in Committee and on Report. He will remember from that debate that points were put forward very forcefully and that extremely strong evidence was presented to us that many staff are simply unable to take time off on Sundays because of concerns and pressure, and the same applies to Boxing day, even though the legislation is different unless Boxing day is on a Sunday. We have to find some way of addressing the issue. I do not think the answer is necessarily for the Opposition to be prescriptive, but we need to get to a point where no one has to work in a large store on Boxing day unless they want to. Like the rest of us, they want to enjoy Christmas. They want to travel, see family and enjoy Christmas eve, not to feel under pressure through to Boxing day.

USDAW’s view is that the only staff who should be available to those large retailers at that time are volunteers. I suppose the point it is making is that if a store could manage purely with volunteers, there would be no objection in principle to that store opening. However, if stores are relying on only the 1.5% of staff who are prepared to work and the 5.5% of staff—I think that was the figure —who are non-committal, most stores would struggle to open without forcing staff to work.

Let me turn to the points about online trading. Things have changed since 2004. The nature and scale of online trading is very different. A number of hon. Members have made points about the impact of online trading on high street and, indeed, out-of-town stores. Perhaps the time has come to look at the needs of staff working in the warehouses such as those that the hon. Member for Kettering described in his constituency. Perhaps it is time to look at what the Government’s responsibility is towards staff who work in warehouses or for internet retailers, and the way in which they are treated. Those staff have a right to a Christmas day and at the moment they are not covered by the Christmas Day (Trading) Act, let alone by what we are talking about for Boxing day. The time has come to consider how that might be addressed and how we might get the kind of fairness that we would all expect for our own families.

Points have been made about the level of trading over Christmas. One estimate is that more than £77 billion will be spent in the Christmas period in the retail sector. Most of the people who work in retail, of course, are very low paid. As we have heard, premium pay is now a thing of the past in most businesses. In that context, is it too much to ask of the major retailers to do more to support their staff by not trading on Boxing day? Remember that those major retailers all have their own internet retail presences, so it is not as if they cannot trade online. By the way, plenty of people go online on Christmas day. It is not just Boxing day, is it?

Some online retailers do not necessarily fulfil orders. The hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey (Drew Hendry) made the point from his own experience in the internet retail sector—he may want to intervene to set me straight on this—that there are plenty of opportunities to delay fulfilment of orders. There are plenty of retailers that do just that, so they are not open 24/7.