Talk:Shops Act 1911

Present or past tense?

The "Background" section (effectively the entire article) appears to have been directly lifted from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, probably by a "bot". Unfortunately, this section begins with the phrase "In four brief acts, 1892 to 1899, still in force..." - presumably a direct quote from that source. At first glance, this wording implies that these four earlier acts are still in force today. However it seems very likely that, although they were still in force back in 1911, they have subsequently been repealed - after all, the first line of the article (the only line that doesn't appear to date from 1911) suggests that the Shops Act 1911 has itself since been repealed.

There therefore seems to be an issue with the tense of this page, with 1911 being regarded as the present rather than the past. I wonder whether there are other articles, also primarily sourced from the (now copyright-free) 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, that suffer from the same problem?

I am certainly not an expert on the subject (which is why I was reading the article in the first place!), and concede that it is possible (albeit unlikely) that these four earlier acts may still be in force. If so, then this needs to be made explicitly clear, as currently the issue is highly ambiguous.

Edits required

The comments above are true. The 1911 act was superseded in 1951, by the Shops (Early Closing Days) Act 1965, and repealled in 1994. See:

• Shops (Early Closing Days) Act 1965 etc.
• Deregulation and Contracting Out Act 1994

The statutory half day holiday has been replaced by the 48 hour working time diective --Robert EA Harvey (talk) 23:24, 26 October 2012 (UTC)