The New Sunday: Reregulating Sunday Trading
One of the more contentious issues which Parliament has sought to resolve in recent years is the question of Sunday trading. Should shops be allowed to open on Sundays and, if so, what sort of shops and for how long or should Sunday trading be regulated at all? These questions encapsulate a range of interests, some of which conflict. Thus, any Bill would be obliged to acknowledge the multi-faceted nature of the debate and successfully balance the interests of consumers, shop workers, retailers (large and small), residents close to shopping areas and those that believe Sunday has a special quality which should be preserved through restricted opening hours on Sundays. In short, there is a combination of economic, social and moral issues that form a backdrop to the ideological debate that often surrounds questions of regulation. A government attempt to roll back the frontiers of the state in relation to Sunday trading failed in the mid-1980s.' This defeat, coupled with a long litigation campaign, resulted in the Sunday Trading Act 1994.2 In this paper, I focus on the content and scope of the new statute after taking a brief look at the history surrounding it, notably the interplay of social changes and litigation strategies that led to reform. The paper will examine the way the statute has balanced the different interests of those affected by Sunday trading and concludes with an analysis of how reform is achieved on contentious issues. More broadly, I will examine why this issue proved so contentious and what this tells us about the way multi-faceted agendas can be disguised behind relatively commonplace questions such as the opening hours of shops on Sundays.