It’s time to end the Sunday Trading farce

The old arguments no longer make sense (if they ever did).

POD! On The Abundance Agenda this week, Martin digs into the mad story of Old Bridge Way, a road in Bedfordshire that… seemingly no one owns. Then we speak to MP Alistair Strathern about the situation, and what it tells us about the fraying social contract between politicians and voters. Plus! E-scooters, and why they might finally, finally, be getting legalised! Listen on Apple, Spotify and Substack!

---

We all do weird things out of a sense of tradition.

For example, there’s no reason why every year a herd of sheep is walked across London Bridge, but the ritual is kept alive anyway, because it’s a fun thing to do, it isn’t particularly disruptive, and it connects the City of London with its history.

For similar reasons, I’m sure that in 500 years’ time, long after the oil wells have run dry, that Parliament will continue to respect another hallowed tradition: the annual freezing of fuel duty by the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

However, as the fuel duty freeze demonstrates, not all traditions are good things, and we often recognise that we must break with the past for the greater good.

For example, we no longer dunk women into rivers to see if they’re witches, or hold trials by combat, even though it would be fun to see who Baroness Hale could take in a fight.

But there is still one terrible tradition we haven’t yet done away with. Despite my best efforts – basically muttering about it under my breath every time it frustrates me – nothing has been done. The rituals appear to be set in stone for the foreseeable future, even though they don’t make any sense whatsoever.

I’m talking, of course, about the maddening restrictions on the hours that shops and other businesses are allowed to open on Sundays.

On one level, this is obviously just because it is inconvenient. It seems insane to me that it isn’t possible to buy a loaf of bread at 6pm on Sunday from a slightly larger supermarket.

But I also think it matters for the economy too. If the government is serious about getting Britain out of its slump, then it seems like an incredibly easy win to let businesses choose their own opening hours.

Like nerdy politics and policy takes? Then subscribe to my newsletter to get more of This Sort Of Thing direct to your inbox.

The madness of Sunday Trading

The most frustrating thing about Sunday trading is that the current status quo makes absolutely no sense.

As things stand, in England, shops are allowed to open on Sundays. Small shops under 280m², which is slightly larger than a tennis court, have no restrictions. But larger stores, like supermarkets and larger high-street stores, and big-box retailers, are only allowed to open for a maximum of six hours in a window between 10am and 6pm. (Though there are a bunch of exceptions for special cases like shops in railway stations and motorway service areas.)

The reason we’ve ended up with this pretty arbitrary dividing line is because of successive attempts to liberalise the law since the 1980s – which culminated with the 1994 Sunday Trading Act, until which basically shops everywhere were completely closed.¹

At the time this was basically seen as a grand bargain – to the point where to get it through Parliament it was declared an unwhipped “conscience” vote – because even though the Tory government at the time wanted to liberalise, there was significant opposition from an unusual alliance between churches and trade unions, in the form of campaigns like “Keep Sunday Special”.

The arguments against were what you might expect: Religious people viewed Sunday as having some sort of special status, and argued that Sundays are for attending church and spending time with family. And the trade union argument was a more practical worry that it would erode protections that workers currently enjoy that prevent bosses from forcing them to work on a Sunday.

And that’s basically how the law has remained since.² Though in the intervening years there have been several attempts to end the madness:

In 2006, the then Labour government conducted a significant review of the law, but eventually decided to do nothing. And in 2012, using the Olympics as an excuse, shops were allowed to open longer for eight Sundays during the Games, but the law reverted after.

The most recent attempt at changing the law was in 2016, when David Cameron attempted to not quite remove Sunday trading laws, but instead devolve the issue to local authorities, so each could make individual decisions on the hours allowed on their patches. But even this pretty modest reform was defeated in the Commons, and the government quickly gave up.

But now we’re eight years on, the world has continued to change, the composition of Parliament is very different, and there’s a new government. So I think it is time to review the situation again.

Guess who finally got around to playing Breath of the Wild recently.

Broken traditions

I think what frustrates me most is that, as per the above, yes there are historically contingent reasons that we’ve ended up where we are…but the resulting fudge makes no sense.

Sure, the status quo is a compromise – but who is it actually satisfying? The reality is that, like it or not, Sunday is clearly no longer “special” in any meaningful sense – other than that it is slightly more annoying to plan your day around.

I mean, it seems silly to entertain the pure religious argument about Sundays being for churchgoing, but even if this made sense in the monoculture of the 1950s, religious rationales do not work today as most people do not live religious lives.

In fact, according to the 2021 census, for the first time less than half of the people in England and Wales identified as “Christian”, and more recent surveys reveal that average Church attendance is down to around a million.

But even if we conclude that this is a consequence of the existing post-94 laws, and even if everyone somehow agreed that more people should go to church, it still doesn’t seem logical to conclude that Sunday trading should be restricted.

I mean, surely if this Jesus guy is as great as people say, his message of “love thy neighbour” should be more compelling than “every little helps” in the marketplace of ideas?³

But I guess I would say this, as I’m a card-carrying humanist, so I spend my Sunday mornings playing Fortnite, and standing in front of the bathroom mirror, imagining what I’d say if I was on the panel on Laura Kuenssberg.

But anyway, let’s leave the theological debate – and concentrate on the material economic argument against liberalising the Sunday trading laws.

The major argument is about protecting workers. I understand why this might make lefties reluctant – who wants to cede more power to big business? And I’m fully supportive of legal protections for people’s rights – not least as I’ve direct experience of how hellish it is working in a shop on a Sunday.

But here the natural experiment of the 2012 Olympics essentially proves why this argument doesn’t quite work, as in that case the protections against working on Sunday remained. The only thing that changed was that businesses were granted greater flexibility to open their premises earlier or later.

So we could keep the protections for employees, and leave it up to employers to persuade their employees to work Sundays through improved terms and conditions.⁴

The growth question

It’s at this point, I’d love to introduce a growth argument. I really wish I could point to a study with a large number in it, and point to how liberalising Sunday trading laws would create a tonne of economic growth – except I can’t, really.

As far as I can tell from the limited studies available, the general consensus is that at best it would have a modest positive impact on GDP. And this makes sense: After all, it’s not as though shops being open for longer would necessarily mean that people need more food, or that they will have more money to spend.

In fact, the best figures I can find are perhaps those from the New West End Company, which represents retailers in and around Oxford Street. In 2016, it argued that liberalisation could bring in an extra £190-290m annually with just two hours extra opening on Sundays, as tourists would have more opportunities to spend money before leaving Britain.

Then if you want to go slightly further back, a 2006 independent analysis for what was then the Department of Trade and Industry landed on GDP uplift of about £1.4bn annually. Though skimming through, I’m not entirely confident how the various assumptions in the model would apply given it is literally two decades out of date.

So I’m not going to predicate my argument on growth – but I do think that of course opening up Sunday trading would have economic upsides:

It would give people more flexibility in their lives, it might mean less time queuing in the supermarket, and instead of supermarkets destroying high streets like we might have assumed not so long ago, it might help save them, by giving people a reason to leave the house, and perhaps grab dinner at a local restaurant on the way home, instead of just ordering whatever they need from Amazon, and then having a dinner cooked by a dark kitchen on an industrial estate.

The strongest argument against

There is one final argument against liberalising Sunday trading, and I think it is the strongest one opponents have: The impact on small businesses. In fact, when the 2016 attempt at reform was defeated, the Federation of Small Business was one of the core opponents, and celebrated when the plan was defeated.

The theory goes that the law as it stands helps protect your local corner shop or convenience store. And small stores are a good thing to have: They help seed walkable communities, where you don’t need to get into a car to buy essentials.

And I definitely appreciate this point. In fact, having walkable, local shops is something I specifically highlighted that the New Town of Ebbsfleet has done well.

But Ebbsfleet is also a good example of why this argument doesn’t quite work anymore. Because it doesn’t have local, independent convenience stores – it has miniature Co-ops, equivalent to Tesco Express, Sainsbury’s Local, and so on.

Today, 29% of convenience stores are operated by chains like this, and today Tesco alone has over 2000 Express stores – apparently putting 77% of the UK population within a ten-minute drive of one.⁵

So Sunday trading isn’t exactly much of a protection against the chains – it’s just an inconvenience, and the supermarkets have found a loophole anyway. In fact – the first Tesco Express opened in 1994, and it probably wasn’t a coincidence.

Anyway, here’s the argument that everyone will hate the most: Even if there is a negative impact on independent stores (far from a given), I think in most cases, these corporate mini-marts are better than their independent equivalents.

That’s because groceries are a wildly complicated miracle of logistics, with complicated supply chains and distribution. And only with scale can such operations offer such a wide range of products that are fresher, and carried from factory to shop shelves with a much higher standard of hygiene and cleanliness, for the same reason that the average McDonald’s with its corporate controls and PR concerns has a higher Food Standards Agency score than your local, independent fried chicken shop.⁶

It’s controversial until it isn’t

One lesson that we’ve learned repeatedly in politics is that often there is a misalignment between what feels controversial, and what people actually, deep down, care about.

The obvious example of this is gay marriage. At the time it felt like David Cameron was making a bold gambit – but once the law had gone through, meaningful opposition almost immediately evaporated as for years, the cultural background noise had laid the foundations for change.

We just saw something similar with housing. For years, the idea of reforming the planning laws was politically toxic, but in 2024 Keir Starmer won a huge majority by saying, out loud and on television repeatedly, that he wanted to build more houses. And once again, thanks to shifts in culture and demographics as my generation entered the housing market, the political cost has so far not been all that great.

And now I think the same is true for the millstone of Sunday trading. Sure, if the government were to attempt reform once again there would be noise. No doubt the Keep Sunday Special campaign would arise once again to mobilise its chimeric coalition of churches, small businesses and trade unions.

But if it finally happened, and supermarkets were able to open their doors at 8am on a Sunday morning, or if you were able to shop at Ikea until 9pm even though you’ve got work tomorrow… would anyone actually notice? Would anyone really complain? Can congregations even diminish any further than they already have? Would people shun their families – or would they just use the more convenient opening hours to buy groceries for them?

Sure, the GDP uplift may be modest at best, but ending the Sunday trading farce will be more convenient for millions of people, and it would give businesses greater flexibility to react to new opportunities – and if we want regulatory tweaks that could help pull Britain out of its malaise, then as the saying goes, every little helps.

Subscribe to my newsletter (for free!) for more takes on politics, policy, infrastructure, tech, media, and apparently retail opening hours. It makes for a great read on a lazy Sunday when there’s nothing else to do.

1. I was only seven years old when the law changed, but I think I’ve got a very dim memory of when it happened.

2. Amazingly we’re not the country with stupid laws here. In places like Switzerland and Germany, shops are often even more restricted – but because they have a similar loophole for train stations, all it functionally means is that stations often host large grocery stores, and on Sunday the entire town piles in to shop there.

3. I also struggle to believe religious people are satisfied with the existing arbitrary compromise anyway. I mean, it’s hard to imagine that Jesus finds the idea of the big Asda opening on Sunday for six hours and one minute somehow sacrilegious, and yet is completely fine with the Tesco Express down the road staying open until 11.

4. This is also a good argument for changing the law now, while Labour are in charge. As you think when the Tories or Reform get in and change the law, they will consider the workers?

5. It’s a shame Tesco hasn’t published the calculation for how many are walkable, for a better comparison.

6. In any case, competition from the big supermarkets is already a fact of life for independent stores – which is why ultimately they’re probably better competing through differentiation: By becoming the fancy artisan bakery, the Polski Sklep, or offering some other specialist fare, they can meaningfully compete in a way that supermarkets cannot.