Why we should keep Greenwich Mean Time at Greenwich

Today MPs are voting Daylight Savings Bill, a proposal that this country, the home of Greenwich Mean Time, should no longer use it and should instead move to Central European Time. Despite earlier opposition, the Government is now throwing its weight behind this shameful proposal.

It would be a terrible shame if this country were to abandon Greenwich Mean Time, on which the world’s time system is based, for Central European Time. It would be absurd for Greenwich itself not to have Greenwich Mean Time. This proposal - the latest of many unsuccessful attempts - is yet another assault on our history and heritage, for the sake of synchronising this country with continental Europe and the Central European Time zone, which is based on Berlin time.

Many of the purported benefits of changing our time zone are spurious. We cannot create more hours of daylight. This change will not give children or anyone else more daylight. It will simply shift the time of the day. If people really think there are safety benefits to be had from having lighter journeys home, then surely the solution is for schools and other institutions to adjust their opening hours accordingly, in accordance with local preference, rather than changing the time zone of the entire country and abandoning Greenwich Mean Time. It is laughable to claim that this change will boost tourism revenue. People do not come to Britain to enjoy light evenings.

Lighter evenings will mean darker mornings, with people’s journeys to work and to school being dark throughout most of the year if this change is adopted. In the winter we will not have daylight until 10am. This will be a problem - contrary to the arguments of some in the South - throughout the UK.

However, the problem will be particularly acute further the north and west, such as in Scotland and Northern Ireland. David Cameron has made clear that any change to the time would need the support of all parts of the UK, yet is clear that much opinion in Scotland and Northern Ireland understandably remains against the proposal. With a referendum on independence promised in Scotland, I do not see why we should needlessly provoke a debate with the Scottish administration, which would play right into the hands of Alex Salmond. It has also been pointed out that this change would mean that Northern Ireland would be one hour different from the Republic of Ireland, which also uses GMT. Again, it seems absurd that GMT would be used in other countries but not in the home of GMT.

The proposal in this Bill is for an assessment by an independent commission and then for a trial period, and the Government’s line that it makes sense for Ministers to look at the potential economic and social benefits of any change. But we have been here before – moving the clocks forward by an extra hour for a trial period from 1968 to 1971. The review of the 1968 experiment found that it was impossible to quantify at that time many of the important claims about the advantages of the change, which are being made today, such as improved road safety and health. However, the review did reveal many practical problems, particularly in the north of England and Scotland, who argued that the change caused discomfort and inconvenience because of the late sunrise in winter. Following a free vote in Parliament on 2nd December 1970, the House of Commons voted by the decisive margin of 366 to 81 to revert to GMT. To repeat this experiment now would be an expensive waste of money, and should hardly be a priority given the serious challenges this country is facing.

More recently, Portugal experimented with a move from GMT to Central European Time in 1992. The experiment was abandoned in 1996 and Portugal reverted to GMT because its population decided that the advantages of lighter evenings were not offset by the disadvantages of darker mornings, just as happened in the UK. Interestingly, children – who supposedly have the most to gain from such a change – were judged to be particularly negatively affected, due to the disruption to their sleeping habits, with it not getting dark until later at night and it not getting light until late in the mornings.

MPs should reject this proposal to shift the UK to Central European Time based on the time in Berlin, and preserve Greenwich Mean Time in Greenwich.