Daylight Saving Bill

Matthew Offord Excerpts

Friday 3rd December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Tobias Ellwood (Bournemouth East) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr MacNeil), and I will address some of the points that he made later.

The principal argument for considering changing the clocks is simple: it is about how we can best align our lives to maximise the benefits of daylight. The idea is not new, of course, but the circumstances in which we are debating the matter are new. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Castle Point (Rebecca Harris) on selecting this subject for her private Member’s Bill and on outlining how the pace of change in our modern busy world makes things different from when the subject was last considered. The second key point is that there is new evidence to support the clock change. Thirdly, the public are more educated in their views than ever before, and that is the case across the country, from Bournemouth all the way up to the constituency that the hon. Gentleman who has just spoken represents. That is reflected in the diverse range of constituencies represented by the Members who are attending this debate. The hon. Gentleman said there were an awful lot of voices against this move in Scotland. I am sorry his hon. Friends were not able to find the time to join him and present themselves and their arguments today.

I first came across this issue when I was shadow tourism Minister. I looked at it without prejudice or passion, and it became clear that it is very important for the tourism industry—I say that just as the hon. Member for Bath (Mr Foster) departs. The Tourism Alliance has done a lot of work on this. However, I stepped away from the specific issue of tourism and thought about how it might benefit or damage the whole of the country.

It is clear that there would be huge benefits in many corners of our lives. I studied the change’s potential impacts on British society as a whole and why the last experiment was unsuccessful. It is clear that Britain is in a different place today. Our lifestyles, technologies, industries and priorities have fundamentally changed since the last experiment. Most people rise after sunrise and stay awake long after sunset, wasting one of the few things in life that are free: daylight. Essentially, this subject is about how we align our lives with the movement of the sun across the heavens.

[Mr Matthew Offord (Hendon) (Con)]

I believe my hon. Friend’s constituency contains a community of orthodox Jewish people, as does mine in Hendon. Would he like to speak about how the proposed changes would affect them, particularly in the winter, but also in the summer when their days of prayer are dictated and determined by sunrise and sunset?

[Mr Ellwood]

My hon. Friend raises an important point. There are many groups, such as the one he has just mentioned, who have concerns in respect of various aspects of life, and those matters need to be weighed up in deciding on the bigger picture of whether this change is worth making. The whole purpose of having this debate and allowing the discussion to progress and the Government to take an interest, is to balance out the various arguments and see whether the change is in the interests of Britain as a whole.

The idea is not new. It is not only various hon. Members of the past who have brought it forward. The Romans adapted their way of life to when the sun was in the sky, using water clocks with various weights to make sure they were up when the sun rose and went to bed when it set. When Benjamin Franklin was ambassador to Paris, he commented on the fact that most Parisians did not get up until midday. He then realised—this is a capitalist viewpoint—that more revenue could be made by putting extra taxes on candles, because they were needed in the evening. He was also encouraging people to take advantage of the free sunlight, however, and he came up with the saying, “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.”

The advent of our railway system moved us on from local timings in towns and villages, as we now had to synchronise time across the entire country. This was measured at the Greenwich observatory, and gave rise to the now familiar Greenwich mean time. Greenwich was referenced as zero degrees longitude and 24 time zones were created around the globe, each covering exactly 50 degrees longitude, but as has been pointed out, not everybody adheres to that. Spain is in alignment with the UK, but it chooses to operate on continental time.