Retail Store Closure: Boxing Day

Debate between Philip Hollobone and Helen Jones

Monday 12th December 2016 Westminster Hall

[Helen Jones]

My hon. Friend is right. We heard from a number of people whose relatives have to look after their children on Boxing day because no childcare is available.

We heard from one lady who described her “nightmare” journey to work. She works in London, but there are no trains from where she lives on Boxing day. She has to get three different buses to work. It takes her a long time. However, she told us that some of her colleagues cannot get home to see their families outside London over Christmas, because they finish too late on Christmas eve and have to get back too early on Boxing day. She described herself as one of the lucky ones. Some luck, I would say.

For all that, many people in the sector now receive no extra pay. It is true, to be fair, that a few people in an online consultation with MoneySavingExpert.com said that they rely on their extra pay on Boxing day to pay for Christmas. I understand that. My answer would be that they should be paid a proper rate of pay throughout the year. Those people are unusual; most companies no longer pay premium rates. They have disappeared, just as the premium rates for Sundays did. The House may remember that we were promised, when Sunday trading was introduced, that people would not have to work on Sundays if they did not want to, and would be paid extra for doing so, but that arrangement disappeared as new people came in, and there were new contracts requiring them to work Sundays and holidays. If they did not sign up for that, they did not get the job. That is how it is for Boxing day as well. It is clear from talking to people in the sector that they can be required to work; an employer has a right to require people to work if it is in their contract, or if it is the usual practice in the industry—and working on Boxing day is increasingly becoming the usual practice. One person said to us, “I don’t get the choice of whether I want to work or not.”

We have been told over and over that people who are sick on Boxing day face disciplinary action, and that a refusal to work means instant dismissal. The worst case we heard of was of a woman who had her drink spiked on Christmas. She was ill and unable to work on Boxing day, and was therefore dismissed. The Government might want to reflect on how difficult it is for those who have the right not to work on Boxing day to enforce that right, given that the Government have extended the time that people have to be employed for before they can claim for unfair dismissal, and have hugely increased employment tribunal fees. Low-paid workers, many of whom are not in unionised workplaces, have very little chance of enforcing their right not to work.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

I am hugely enjoying the hon. Lady’s speech; she is making a powerful case. Some 181 people in Kettering signed the petition. The Library briefing for the debate says:

“Under the relevant legislation…workers do not have a statutory entitlement to time off on Bank Holidays”,

which includes Boxing day. I am not saying whether that is right or wrong, but is it the hon. Lady’s wish that employees be statutorily entitled to have Boxing day off?

[Helen Jones]

I think the hon. Gentleman is right about the law as it stands; if he will forgive me, I will come to that in a moment.

Retailers say that Boxing day trading is important to them. The British Retail Consortium declined to give written evidence to my Committee before the debate, but in the past it has said that last year’s sales were up 0.7% on the year before. However, it is important to remember that those sales did not reach the December peak, which last year was on 23 December, or the November peak, which last year was on the day after that appalling American import, Black Friday.

The director of retail intelligence at Ipsos Retail Performance said:

“Boxing Day has grown in significance as a shopping day over the last 5 years, as increasingly more retailers have started their Sales immediately after Christmas.”

I say two things to that: first, sales are on now, as anybody who has looked around knows; secondly, I have not seen any evidence that Boxing day opening generates more trade, rather than moving it about between days. If retailers were closed on Boxing day, there might well be more trade on 27 December—or, more likely, the Saturday following Christmas, when most people are off work.

However, we have had evidence that some stores may not even be that busy; I accept that some are, but some are certainly not. One store manager told us that his store was less busy than on a usual Sunday. Other people working in retail have told me that they are not busy, and that they do not accept returns on Boxing day because that would make the sales figures look worse. There are differences across the sector, and it seems that many shops open simply because others do; staff and store managers in my constituency say that that is often the case. As someone said in our consultation, retailers are great followers. Many in the sector would like Boxing day to be treated like Christmas day and Easter Sunday, when large stores cannot open. In fact, 92% of respondents to an USDAW consultation did not want to work on Boxing day, but 78% felt that they were pressured to.

The opening of the stores has a price for our communities, for families and for individuals; nothing in life is for free. If more shops open on Boxing day, there needs to be more of other services, such as waste collection; emergency services must be on duty; and there is more pressure on transport to run as normal. There is a spiral effect when more and more people are made to work the bank holiday. As I said, there is a price for families. People lose the time with their children or their parents, and other members of the family are very often pressed into service looking after children, meaning that they cannot make plans for the day. The real impact is on the poorly paid retail workers and their families, and from the comments that we have received, it is clear that most people would rather have that day off.

[Helen Jones]

My hon. Friend is right. That is an example of the pressures that those retail workers come under, many of whom are women and have caring or childcare responsibilities. I doubt that much would change if store openings began on 27 December. As one of the contributors to the consultation said about stores, “They will make their money back, but we will never get our time back.”

What is the purpose of all this? Does anyone actually gain? As another person said to us in the consultation, “I should like to think that the keen shoppers of the UK could wait one more day to grab a juicy bargain”—or, as staff call it, stock that has been gathering dust in the stockroom since 1993. Another person said, “Isn’t seven-day trading and numerous late nights enough?” I think it is.

[Mr Hollobone]

I am even more impressed by the hon. Lady’s speech as it goes on; she is making an extremely powerful case. However supportive I might be of her argument, one of the difficulties is that if people cannot physically go to a high street or out-of-town shop, they will shop online on Christmas day or Boxing day. That will ultimately take business away from the very shop workers whose livelihoods we are seeking to protect.

[Helen Jones]

The hon. Gentleman makes a very reasonable point. My view is that, if people are going to shop online rather than go to the shops, they are going to do that anyway. For instance, it was put to me that many people receive vouchers for Christmas, particularly children, and that they enjoy spending them. Yes, they do, and I suspect they would enjoy spending them just as much on 27 December.

We need to find a balance. If my right to shop is being exercised at the expense of some of the poorest-paid people in our community, their time with their family should take precedence. It is a question of what kind of society we want. Do we want a society in which people are able to spend time with their family—their children or parents—or maybe even invite in an elderly neighbour who is on their own, or do we want a society that is a free-for-all, and in which the weakest go to the wall?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

Thank you for calling me, Mrs Moon. In truth, I had not intended to speak, but I was so moved by the powerful speech made by the hon. Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones) that I felt inclined to do so on behalf of my 181 constituents who signed the petition.

I find myself in the awkward position of seeing both sides of the argument. My instinctive sympathy is for retail workers who are forced to work on Boxing day, when they feel they should not have to do so. I feel for them, as I would anyone who was forced to work on Christmas day, which of course has statutory protection. My solution to this dilemma is for the Government to enact the relevant legislation, such that it would not be compulsory for retail workers to work on Boxing day if they did not wish to do so. I do not see why that would be difficult for the Government to do. There would be retail workers who were prepared to work on Boxing day if they had, to their mind, the requisite recompense to do so.

The reason I come to that compromise is that we now live, rightly or wrongly, in the age of the internet. Whether physical shops are open or closed on whatever day of the week, internet shopping will always be available. The bald, bold truth is that many retail workers will have signed this petition who will themselves go online on Boxing day to shop for items they want. While that is a digital choice, at the end of the day that digital request goes through to a warehouse—perhaps one of the warehouses in Kettering—where an employee is given an instruction to get that item from a shelf and put it on a pallet to go into a lorry for delivery to that consumer.

We are talking today—I recognise that it is with the best of intentions—about retail workers in physical shops on the high street or in our retail parks. However, they are in competition with real human beings who are employed in warehouses to respond to digital requests for consumer goods. Those digital requests are being posted online 24/7. People are shopping on the internet at times when you and I, Mrs Moon, may not think about shopping. Those retail requests go through to employees in warehouses who physically have to get those items off shelves and put them on pallets to go into lorries. The difficulty that I have—I am sure other Members have the same difficulty, if they are really honest about it—in responding to this petition is that we have to make a choice between retail workers on our local high street and employees in our local warehouses. It is a difficult choice that we, as parliamentarians, have to be honest about.

A fair compromise would be for the Government to say that no one should be required to work on Boxing day. That would give an element of statutory protection, recognising that Boxing day is the day after Christmas and has special meaning in our country. As the hon. Lady said, it goes back to giving servants boxes to thank them for their service over the previous year. We would then recognise the contribution that retail employees make and say to them that they do not have to work on Boxing day if they do not want to. There would be no downside for them—no loss of pay, pension or holiday entitlement—if they decided they did not want to work on Boxing day, but someone who wanted to would have every right to do so.

[Helen Jones]

I see where the hon. Gentleman is coming from, but does he not recognise that, even with the right he suggests, many low-paid workers in this sector are and would be pressured into giving up their Boxing day? There is little to prevent that because, with low-paid workers often in non-unionised workplaces, there is not an equal balance of power here.

[Mr Hollobone]

The hon. Lady, following on from her good-natured speech, makes a characteristically powerful point. I recognise that, but the brutal, honest, bald, bold truth is that if we said that shops were not allowed to open on Boxing day, millions of our fellow citizens would shop online. Instead of talking about human beings in high street shops, we would be talking about more of our fellow human beings in our local warehouses responding to people shopping online. That is the reality.

[Helen Jones]

The hon. Gentleman is being very generous in giving way. Surely his argument is one for 24-hour shop opening. People can shop online at any time. Is there not some place where we just have to draw a line?

[Mr Hollobone]

I am very sympathetic indeed to the hon. Lady’s cause. I voted against extending shop opening hours during the Olympics, and I voted against liberalising Sunday trading, but I recognise that I am probably on the wrong side of history in this debate because of the influence of internet shopping. I am trying to be honest with the hon. Lady and the Chamber. Ultimately, we are here to represent the citizens in our communities. Some of those citizens will work very hard in our local high street shops and some will work very hard in a local warehouse, especially in Kettering, just down road responding to digital requests. If I supported the thrust of the debate and said we should ban retail sales on Boxing day, I would be saying that that local high street employees were not allowed to work on Boxing day, but employees in the warehouse down the road could work and would be working harder, because they would be responding to online digital requests from our fellow citizens who decided to shop on Christmas day and Boxing day.

Do I think there should be 24/7 shopping? No, I do not. Do I think we should recognise what is left of our Christian heritage? Yes, I do. Do I think this request for a special exemption for Boxing day is religiously driven? No, I do not. I think that whatever Christian meaning there was in Boxing day has probably long departed us, unfortunately. Do I recognise there is still a religious and cultural significance to Christmas in our country? Absolutely, I do.

That is why I suggest what I hope is a reasonable compromise: employees should not be required to work on Boxing day and there would be no redress against them if they decided not to do so. I recognise absolutely what the hon. Lady is saying about hidden pressures, or sometimes overt pressures, on employees who do not wish to work on Boxing day, but I hope Her Majesty’s Government could establish a system that was fair enough and understood by enough people for it to be accepted in this country that if people did not want to work on Boxing day, that would be fine.

That would probably mean that employees who wanted to work on Boxing day would have to be paid more. In many ways that is not a bad thing, but it would have to be accepted by employees who chose not to work on Boxing day that they would not be entitled to that double or triple pay. They would have to make a choice. If we are honest, many employees who do not want to work on Boxing day now might want to if they were offered double or triple time. I am not saying that is a satisfactory choice. I am just saying it is probably a realistic one that would result from such a system.

With that compromise, I think we would end up with a smaller number of people who were dissatisfied and a larger number who were happy to accept the end result. I cannot see any other way of solving the problem and cracking the nut. That is difficult because we now live in an online world. If we were having this debate 20 years ago, I would have agreed absolutely with the hon. Lady that retail shopping on Boxing day should be banned, but in 2016-17 it is almost impossible to do that because of the internet. I do not like it; I am not advocating it. I am just saying that is the way it is.

My solution and my humble petition to the Chamber in response to this excellent petition signed by so many people is that Her Majesty’s Government should make a sensible compromise and tell retail workers they do not have to work on Boxing day if they do not want to, but if they do, they have every right to do so.