Anger over Sunday trading inquiry

Press, 28 January 1988, Page 3

Anger over Sunday trading inquiry

By

NIGEL MATTHUS

More than 20 Christchurch businesses are being investigated by the Labour Department for allegedly selling on Sundays goods not approved for Sunday trading. The action, however, is not a “blitz” initiated by the department. It is acting on complaints received, all from the same source. “Our policy is to investigate on receipt of written complaints,” said a senior inspector of the department, Mr Nolan Barnes. He would not reveal the source of the complaints. The businesses named were mainly service stations and garden centres. All have been written to, but departmental officers have so far visited only one, said Mr Barnes — the Cashmere Downs Nursery. THe owner of Cashmere Downs, Mr Chris Alleyne, said that the inspector arrived on Sunday and found on sale merchandise such as outdoor furniture, barbecues, tools, hoses, and hose fittings. The nursery had been selling “all that stuff” when he bought the business about three years ago, and he had simply continued to do so, said Mr Alleyne. “I honestly believed those rules were long gone," he said. The Labour Department

said that it had not yet decided whether to prosecute Cashmere Downs, or any of the businesses complained about. Mr Alleyne said however, that he had been verbally advised that he would not be prosecuted if he complied with the regulations in future, by putting away the non-approved goods on Sundays. Mr Alleyne was nevertheless angry at the development, and concerned that he would lose business to competitors whose Sunday trading activities have not been brought to the department’s attention. Sunday was the nur-. sery’s busiest day, and merchandise not on the approved goods list made up much of his business. Mr Alleyne emphasised that he was not attacking the Labour Department staff. “I know for a fact they're not happy administering this archaic legislation. They’d like to see it gone,” he said. Mr Alleyne hoped that the regulations could be changed through a recently formed advisory committee looking at shop trading hours. That committee, headed by the Shop Trading Hours Commissioner, Mr Kevin Bell, has recently called for submissions and will hold hearings in the four main centres in Apig|. Its report is ex-

pected by the end of May. Although its terms of reference concerned trading hours, rather than the approved goods list, that list was an adjunct to the Shop Trading Hours Act, said Mr Bell. The committee would accept “any submissions — the more factual input that the committee can get, the better,” he said. Mr Alleyne said that he would make submissions to the committee, and he called on other Sunday traders and the public to do the same. “The committee needs to know that the public want to buy a reel of hose on a Sunday.” The approved goods list was presumably intended to protect traders who did not open on Sunday, but in a free market there was no place for that sort of protection, he said. Mr Alleyne said that he was also considering laying complaints of illegal Sunday trading against the owners of other garden centres — “some of whom are personal friends” — not just to protect his commercial competitiveness but also to prompt them into making submissions to the committee. “I can’t see any other way of stirring up enough dust to get a change in the legislation,” he sas r