Lord Alton of Liverpool
Main Page: Lord Alton of Liverpool (Crossbench - Life peer)
Lord Stevenson of Balmacara
My Lords, when it was first introduced, this Bill was described as a Christmas tree Bill, as have a number of Bills from the Minister’s department. Therefore, it is a particular pleasure to receive a Christmas present at the end of the process in the form of a wholly unlooked for, but none the less very welcome, strengthening of the powers that now apply to people who have to work within the existing legislation on Sundays.
I am not sufficiently expert in Whitehall matters to know how long it would have been until an appropriate Bill came round and these very important issues would have been taken on their merits. Of course, as the noble Baroness said—she did not give us the gory detail—there was a bit of a circuit round Whitehall to find, first, a Bill that would take the devolution proposals and then a Minister willing to put the proposals into a Bill. Indeed, I seem to remember the noble Baroness saying at a meeting, perhaps informally, that the last thing she wanted to see in her Bill was a measure involving Sunday trading. She has had to concede a very important set of small paragraphs which will help people who currently work on Sunday, and we are delighted to have them.
This should go down as one of those case studies that appear in books describing how awful Whitehall can be sometimes, because at the meetings I went to we could never work out what the Government were trying to do. Was this about tourism or an attempt to defeat the incursion of internet shopping into our high streets? Was it to promote high streets? Was it to make sure that smaller shops in smaller towns were supported? It never really got sorted out. As one of the participants at the meetings, the right reverend Prelate pointed out that at the end of the day, unless you sorted this out in a holistic way, involving the staff from the beginning, it simply would not happen —and it did not. With that ringing in our ears, we welcome this proposal and look forward to its early implementation.
Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)
My Lords, before we leave this group of amendments, I echo something that the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, said a moment or two ago about the importance of protecting workers’ rights. I was involved in the original legislation when it was enacted and spoke in another place about protecting workers who wanted to opt out of having to work on Sundays, and I moved amendments that excluded Christmas Day and Easter Day—two of the very few amendments that were successful at that time.
To some extent, these amendments merely tinker with the protections provided previously. A lot of evidence has been gathered in the years since the enactment of the original legislation which indicates that those protections need strengthening further. I simply refer the Minister to what one of her predecessors —the noble Lord, Lord Sassoon—promised Parliament back in 2012, on 24 April, when he spoke at the Second Reading of the Sunday Trading (London Olympic and Paralympic Games) Bill. He said that Parliament would have the opportunity fully to debate the issue of Sunday trading restrictions if the issue were revisited. I simply ask the Minister why it therefore required the intervention of notable Members of Parliament such as Mr David Burrowes and the redoubtable Fiona Bruce, who worked across the divide to defeat the Government’s proposals, to prevent something being stampeded through without proper parliamentary scrutiny. Why was the promise given to the House in 2012 not honoured? Why did we not have a debate about this when it was in your Lordships’ House in the first instance, before it went to another place? Perhaps the Minister will shed light on that.
The Minister will know that there were some 7,000 responses to the consultation process the Government initiated. It would be a great breach of trust in the future—at a time when trust is not held in very high esteem by many people when looking at Parliament and politics—if we were both to ignore the responses to the consultation process and circumvent the promises Ministers have previously given. If any further changes are intended, will there be the opportunity for full parliamentary scrutiny? Can we please not use such methods, which, in the end, it took members of the Minister’s own party in the House of Commons to prevent the Government from proceeding with in a very high-handed way?
Lord Mackay of Clashfern (Con)
I associate myself with a good deal of what the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool, has said. In particular, strengthening the rights of those in the retail trade in relation to Sunday trading is very important. I am glad that, however it has come about, it has ultimately been a government proposal which I hope noble Lords will agree to very quickly.