British Summer Time (and the living is easy)

We’ve finally made it to the last weekend in March, when the British put their clocks forward to British Summer Time (BST), or Greenwich Mean Time(GMT) + 1 hour. The long winter nights are finally over, and it will be light for our journey home from work all the way through until November when the clocks will be set back to GMT for another five months. The only questions now is why on earth we only advance our clocks by one hour, and why do we use GMT all through the winter months. It would increase the quality of our lives enormously if we were to use GMT +1 hour during the winter and GMT + 2 hours during the summer. Why don’t the British do that?

Arguments in favour of this change:

1. It would put us on the same time zone as most of Europe, improving communication and increasing the ease of business transactions
2. It would increase the amount of daylight we are exposed to during at least 4 months of the year, thus reducing the incidence of Seasonal Affective Disorder, a form of depression associated with lack of daylight during the winter months.
3. It would save about 200 lives per year on our roads. Drivers are more alert during the morning, and thus keeping the daylight for the evening hours would reduce accidents including fatal ones during the dark evenings.
4. It would reduce the number of hours we need to light our homes and streets, saving some energy (thought there seems to be a debate about exactly how much). (In the USA the lighting issue is offset by increased use of air conditioning; but in the UK we don’t have the same consideration.)

A recent petition on the Downing Street website asked the government to switch to consider changing to Central European Time (i.e. GMT+1/GMT+2), and in response the government trotted out a list of reasons why they didn’t want to make this change. Most of these arguments were established in the 1970s when a trial of leaving the clocks on BST all year was undertaken for a couple of years. Indeed I remember as a child being dressed in reflective clothing to keep me safe during the dark mornings.

Arguments against the change:

1. Farmers prefer to have lighter mornings in the winter
2. The construction industry prefers to start work early, and this is affected by dark mornings in the winter
3. In Scotland the mornings are darker because they are further north. They prefer the light at the start of the day.
4. Milk and postal delivery people don’t like dark mornings
5. It is dangerous for school children to travel to school during the dark mornings. As the schools come out earlier than offices, children don’t benefit from the shift to light evenings.

However, that was the 1970s and much has changed since then which out-dates most of these arguments:

1. The number of people working the land has decreased, and the number of people driving cars to work has increased – in both cases the changes have been dramatic.
2. Scotland has far more autonomy, and could easily be allowed to set its own time zone
3. Milk deliveries have all but disappeared, and the postal service no longer attempts to deliver before breakfast
4. After-school clubs and social activities, and a general shift to all parents working have meant that children are travelling much later in the day and therefore exposed to the dark evenings in winter.
5. So that leaves only the construction companies affected by any such change. My only comment on that is that changing the clocks does not change the number of hours of daylight – simply the time at which it is light.

I have considered changing my own habits to allow me more daylight in the evenings. If I were to get up an hour earlier, go to work an hour earlier and leave the office an hour earlier I wouldn’t need everyone else to change. However, that’s not as easy as I first seems. I already get up at 06:00, so adjusting it any further would require a bedtime so early that I would have to drop out of society entirely. And anyone who has ever worked in an office will know that getting in early is easy; leaving early is another matter entirely. My other option is to move to France, where they use Western European Time. If I could figure out a way to maintain my income from France then that is what I would do. As it is, I find it simpler to remain in the UK and whinge for 5 months of the year.