Sunday Trading (London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games) Bill [Lords]

Helen Jones Excerpts

Monday 30th April 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Umunna]

It is reasonable for any employee to object to working on a Sunday so that they can spend more time with their family.

Members on both sides of the House will have been contacted by USDAW, the shop workers’ union, on this issue. USDAW does an excellent job for its members and we are proud to be associated with it. Its members power one of our most successful and internationally competitive sectors. In short, its 400,000 members are wealth creators and we should celebrate and take notice of them. USDAW has surveyed more than 20,000 members, and some 78% of those surveyed oppose longer opening hours on Sundays during the period of the operation of this Bill; 51% said they already felt pressurised to work on Sundays against their will; and 73% said that longer Sunday opening would lead to pressure on them to work on Sundays against their will.

[Helen Jones (Warrington North) (Lab)]

It is already clear that many shop workers feel pressure to work on Sundays, despite the legal protections enshrined in the original Sunday Trading Act 1994, which are totally ineffective. Does it not say much about the Tories that the hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Mrs Grant) argued that this Sunday trading would give more flexibility to families without realising that the families of many shop workers would have their Sunday time destroyed by this Bill? Do they not also deserve time with their families at the weekends?

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[Meg Munn]

Many, many people are concerned and suspicious of that. Clearly, the view expressed by the hon. Gentleman has some merit, but the concerns expressed by his hon. Friend the Member for Sittingbourne and Sheppey (Gordon Henderson), who has worked in the retail industry, also have a great deal of merit.

[Helen Jones]

My hon. Friend, like me, represents a constituency a long way from London. Does she agree that it is most unfair that shop workers in my constituency and hers should be forced to work on Sundays, and that convenience stores should suffer the resulting drop in trade, because the Government have decided to extend the experiment throughout the country?

[Meg Munn]

That is precisely my point. If the Government had set out to undertake proper consultation, the suggested changes could have been tightly focused and would have reassured, instead of increasing bad feeling and suspicion about the Government’s intentions.

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[Chris Ruane]

Absolutely. We are seeing huge shopping malls spread across the UK, but there is more to life than, “Work, consume, die.”

[Helen Jones]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government’s attempts to define the nation by how much it shops simply shows that the expense wasted on their education did not give them any sense of values?

[Chris Ruane]

As a political class, we have gone along with that trend. I include the previous Labour Government. We operated on the terms of “consumer” and “producer”; rarely was the term “citizen” used. We have lost a lot over the years.

If we want American shopping malls as the positive, we must live with the negatives of American society. Twenty-nine per cent. of American children have mental illness and 40% are obese; the proportion is likely to increase to 60%. Oliver James puts mental illness across the western world down to advertising. The purpose of an advertisement is to sow discontent and make people unhappy, so that they go out and buy the product. Two per cent. of American GDP is spent on advertising and it has the mental health rates I described. One per cent. of UK GDP is spent on advertising, and the rate is 0.5% in mainland Europe.

We need to slow down and ask ourselves as a society—and the Government have to ask themselves—what people out there want. They might say they want shops, but that is not what they truly want. In the rat race, even the winners are still rats. It is now recognised that to be a shopaholic, like an alcoholic, is to have a mental illness. People feel the need to shop and prove themselves through materialism, but let us remember that the flipside of consumerism is alienation, and the flipside of materialism is individualism. The breakdown of society, promoted since the 1980s, has a lot to do with it. People are far from their natures. Many of us—I include myself in this—are on this hydraulic treadmill. People try to provide for their children and buy the latest fashions—otherwise they are not normal—but this hydraulic treadmill, which is spinning too fast, will be sped up if we adopt this measure and make it permanent. We need to slow down.

I tabled a parliamentary question, answered on 15 March, about family happiness. The answer came back from the Minister that children were happier in a family if the parents judged themselves to have good relationships, but to have good relationships, they need a day off a week—at least—on which they can talk. Apparently a family was more likely to be happy if it ate more meals together. My favourite meal of the week is the traditional British Sunday roast. That will not be cooked or served if parents are out working. The third criteria for a happy family was discussing important matters. The most reflective day of the week is a Sunday.

We have made many gains, especially under the previous Government, including on flexible hours, the minimum wage, and maternity and paternity leave. Those were positive measures, but some Government Members see them as red tape and bureaucracy. I hope that tonight’s proposal is not a way of attacking those gains or a back-door way of disassembling what Labour has achieved over many years. We need to slow down. We need time for awareness, to sniff the flowers, to notice, to reflect, to have silence and to express gratitude. To do that, however, we need at least one day a week off. We broke into that. Many people now work six hours on Sundays, but we should not extend that. We do so at our peril and the peril of our children and families.