Daylight Saving Bill

Debate between Matthew Offord and Angus Brendan MacNeil

Friday 20th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr MacNeil]

There is eminent sense in the approach of talking, rather than rushing headlong into a miserable trial. That is where the real danger is.

In the period when the clocks were not put back in winter, the decline in the number of road deaths slowed. If last winter we had gone back to the number of road deaths that we had in the winter of the trial period between’68 and ’71, there would have been three times the number of road deaths. We also now have faster cars and more cars on the road. The argument on safety, which is made with an air of moral certainty, has to be taken on and the data must be challenged. I hope that that is what I am doing. I do not like the moralising tone that is sometimes used towards me when I am looking after the interests of my constituents and the interests of young children and their education, particularly as those arguments are eminently challengeable.

[Mr Offord]

The hon. Gentleman is correct about the causal links in the accident rate. In my time at Barnet council, I oversaw a 40% reduction in the number of people killed or seriously injured. That had nothing to do with light or darkness; it was to do with removing speed humps and reconfiguring road junctions. It was those policies that reduced the KSIs in my area.

[Mr MacNeil]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. There is a danger that we will be distracted from the more important road safety issues if we imagine that the extra hour is a panacea. The measures that he mentions are probably far more important than the light at a particular hour, which is distracting far too many people when there are safety measures that need to be used.

I am struck by the fact that road deaths fell by 300 between the winter of 2009 and the winter of 2010-11. Had the moves in the previous Parliament to have lighter evenings during the winter succeeded, a causal link would have been drawn between the lighter evenings and the drop in deaths. As we now know, that reduction in deaths happened anyway, with darker evenings. It is dangerous to make assumptions and links between lighter evenings and deaths on the roads, particularly as the rate of deaths decreased immediately after the study of the late 1960s and the ’70s. Perhaps that study delayed the rate of the decrease.

I move back to energy. The data used to support the changes seem to have a serious flaw. The campaign’s main source of data is 24 studies on the effect of lighter evenings. Of those 24, only six were empirical studies and the rest were simulations. The paper examining them found that 15 studies concluded that there were energy savings. Of those 15, approximately two were empirical studies and 10 were simulations. The odd thing about the simulations is that they showed savings of 0.2% and 2%, and another study showed a saving of 0%. Surely a 0% saving could also be called a 0% loss. The information that we have from Indiana, Portugal and elsewhere shows that energy would be lost, not saved, if the change was made, and there would not be safety gains.

As for tourism, my amendment suggesting that the studies be carried out in November would ensure that it could not benefit from another month of “lighter later”. That would be a perfect compromise for many of us who need to find consensus, extend an olive branch and find middle ground. I fear that an all-or-nothing campaign would yield exactly nothing.