Daylight Savings Time (DST), the twice yearly changing of the clocks across Europe causes disruption and has been shown to be damaging to health.
Britain ran an experiment between 1968-1971 in which British Summer Time was left in place all year round; clocks went forward in March 1968 and not put back until October 1971.
The experiment resulted in an 11 per cent reduction in casualties in England and Wales during the hours affected by the time change. Although casualties in the morning increased slightly, the decrease in casualties in the evening more than outweighed this.
A recent survey gathered 4.6m responses with 84 per cent against Daylight Savings Time. Violeta Bulc, the EU’s transport commissioner, said the survey was conducted following petitions from those arguing that the twice yearly changes are detrimental to health, increase road danger and no longer serve their original purpose of helping to preserve fuel supplies.
“There is no obvious evidence that this energy saving is happening”, Ms Bulc said. “Sometimes you need to look at legislation and say ‘the king is naked, this no longer serves people’.”
The EU has regulated the start and end of Daylight Savings Time for 30 years in order to coordinate national switching dates.
The plan is for European countries to decide on whether they would prefer to stay in summertime or wintertime and then stay on it all year round. The abolition of DST change is unlikely to happen before 2021 as it is likely to have a significant effect on transport timetables.
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Alan
Why will this have “a significant effect on transport timetables”?
My 8am BST morning train just becomes the 8am GMT morning train when the clocks go back.
Of course inter-continental flights will be affected, but they already are anyway by varying winter/summer time changes around the world.
Dr John Heathcote
The most sensible thing to do is to move working hours so that they are centralised on astronomical midday, making best use of daylight all year. Difficult to enforce for the private sector perhaps, but change government office opening times to 08:00 – 16:30 and move the TV news to 9 PM and things will change.
BST in winter would be especially grim here in the far north of Scotland, where it would not get light until 10 AM.
G
Sunrise would be well after 9am in the far north of Scotland or the extreme west but since the population here is tiny compared with the SE of England I suppose we would just have to be dominated by the views of the majority in England – just like Brexit 🙁
AlexOn
_____1234______DST: Time for change_____1234______
John
Daily savings time was introduced to help farmers. Nothing to do with saving fuel!
Get your facts right!