Daylight Saving Bill

Bob Stewart Excerpts

Friday 20th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Chope]

My difficulty is that there is nothing to prevent the Government from commissioning an inquiry and getting the evidence that would enable the hon. Gentleman to reach a decision on this contentious issue. I cannot understand why, if the Government support the Bill, they have not already embarked on getting a body of evidence together. That evidence could then be presented to the House and we could decide whether we thought, in the light of that evidence, that we should make any changes to the clocks. I will refer to that in a bit more detail later.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

Well, there is some evidence, is there not? One might say that as a London MP I would say that, but the Greater London authority’s economic experts have suggested that the UK economy would benefit by about £1 billion in all regions, not just in London. There is already some evidence.

[Mr Chope]

Certainly there is, and my hon. Friend refers to it, but I believe that the Government and the promoter of the Bill accept that there is not enough evidence on which to take a decision. The Government are saying they need to gather more evidence, which suggests that the evidence to which my hon. Friend refers is not sufficient for either the promoter of the Bill or the Government.

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[Mr Chope]

My hon. Friend states that the politicians lost their nerve. I do not know whether that is correct, but surely the important thing is that the House, with the combined political wisdom of all its Members, ultimately takes the decision. Instead of leaving it, as the Bill does, to the Government to introduce an order—albeit one that would have to be approved by the affirmative procedure —the Government should introduce a Bill having first gathered the evidence. That way we could vote on the Bill in an informed way.

[Bob Stewart]

Let us be quite clear. If there is evidence, as there seems to be, that changing how we run our clocks will save lives—according to the London estimate, it would mean six fewer deaths and 23 fewer severe injuries a year—we have a duty to consider how we manage our time. That is our responsibility as a Parliament.

[Mr Chope]

I do not wish to criticise my hon. Friend in public but he will know that the outstanding Mayor of London introduced facilities to encourage more cycling in London. It is possible to argue, from the figures that I have seen, that as a consequence there have been more injuries and deaths among London cyclists, but I do not think that my hon. Friend would argue that we should ban cycling in London just because it might save lives.

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[Mr Chope]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for taking the opportunity to explain a bit more about his amendment.

[Bob Stewart]

I accept that point, but my hon. Friend must also accept that there is other evidence. For example, in London, there will be an annual reduction of 80,000 tonnes of CO₂ and energy savings of £20 million a year. We do not know the facts, which is all the more reason why we should have a trial to find them out as best we can.

[Mr Chope]

In that case, my hon. Friend will obviously be very supportive of amendment 12. It would ensure that the facts to which he has just referred would have to be examined by the independent panel. I am sure that our hon. Friend—if we can call him that as a member of the coalition—the Member for Argyll and Bute would be very supportive of the view taken by my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart). I hope that amendment 12 will find favour with the Government and with the promoter of the Bill.

That brings me to amendment 23, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley, which would require the independent oversight group to have at least one member from each of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. That seems eminently sensible, because what can the Bill’s promoter or the Government have against having somebody from each of the four nations of the United Kingdom represented on the group?

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[Mr MacNeil]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. I know that the cold in Banff and Buchan is balanced only by the warm hearts of its people, and certainly by their good sense in yet again returning an SNP Member. Her points are well made and serious, and indeed they are backed up not only by her own experience, but by evidence from Indiana in the United States and from Portugal. The phones have been busy between my office and Portugal in the last wee while. Mr Rui Agostinho, director of Lisbon’s astronomical observatory, the institution responsible for legal time in Portugal, has said that a company contracted by the European Commission at the time showed that the energy savings gained were ultimately lost with the increase of energy consumption during the morning.

[Bob Stewart]

Look, we have listened to this all morning. It is clear that we are not absolutely certain what would be the result of a change. Is it not terribly important for us to check by having a trial to determine whether we would actually save more lives and save more energy? All this talk should stop and we should just vote on it now and have the trial.

[Mr MacNeil]

I admire the hon. and gallant Gentleman’s headlong enthusiasm, but we must reflect before plunging ourselves into 15 months of misery. It can be seriously argued that the change in the late ’60s and early ’70s cost lives, because the rate of road accident deaths did not go down as quickly during that period as it did in subsequent years. If I have to repeat myself again and again before that is understood, I will do so. If we disregard such a serious fact and run to a trial, surely we are putting people in danger.

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[Mr MacNeil]

I say that we should have a series of Novembers. As I have said, I am a conciliatory man, and I have extended an olive branch. Rather than plunge areas of the country north of Manchester into darkness for two months a year, with no sunrise before 9 am, I say, okay, there is an ongoing argument for gathering data, so let us gather data in November, the most dangerous month, instead of over five months of winter and for 15 months in total. We could reduce the inconvenience to 20%, and I am fairly confident that, once we introduce those three months, once we have the attendant misery and once we see what comes of that, lighter evenings will not be seen to have such great benefits after all. We will get the taste of the inconvenience without going through the utter misery of an entire winter period.

[Bob Stewart]

Why is the hon. Member for the islands of Scotland, where I, too, came from once, confident that the month of November will give him the results that he expects? He does not know, and the best way of finding out is to have a flipping trial.

[Mr MacNeil]

Well, if the hon. Gentleman—