Stephen Timms – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Stephen Timms on 2015-10-22.

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, what research his Department has commissioned or undertaken to assess the potential effect on small businesses of proposed changes to Sunday trading laws.

Anna Soubry

We have consulted on our proposals to devolve the power to extend Sunday trading hours to local areas, to which we received a large number of responses from a wide range of stakeholders. We will be publishing the Government’s response shortly. In the consultation, we said we considered that devolving this power would enable local areas to determine the Sunday trading hours that better reflect the need of local people, providing greater choice over when and where they shop. People may choose small retailers, as for example, they offer a diverse range of products and services from convenient locations. This is perhaps why the convenience sector last year saw the opening of two new stores a day and growth in turnover of 5%.