Keep Summer Time to lighten a grim winter

Turning the clocks back each year makes no sense, least of all in the midst of a pandemic

Groan! It looks like it’s going to be an autumn, and quite possibly winter, of lockdowns, curfews, isolation and early closing. But there is something Boris could do to raise the gloom – quite literally. Something he urged publicly in this very newspaper back in 2011. Something that would, he wrote, “save lives, expand the economy and cheer everyone up”. That something is quite simple: make it summer – or at least Summer Time – all year round. Come October 25, don’t put the clocks back.

Surveys show that two-thirds of us support this idea. The dark winter evenings make us miserable, particularly people with depression and those who suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). Opting for lighter evenings would be especially helpful for national well-being at a time when we are all being encouraged to work from home again. This was miserable enough in March and April when many came to rely on their Government-approved run or walk in the evening to break the monotony of the working day. In the depths of winter, it will be dark by the time many home workers are able to log off. Another hour to squeeze in some fresh air would make all the difference.

This would throw a lifeline to our struggling hospitality sector, shops and tourist attractions, too. The Government has closed pubs, cafes and restaurants in some places and imposed curfews everywhere. Shops are already suffering from the lack of footfall as people lock down at home, or decide it simply isn’t worth going out when so many places are closed.

Soon, those businesses will suffer the double whammy of darker evenings, which will make customers even less willing to go out and spend. Lighter evenings would be a godsend to pubs and restaurants, especially those now serving people outside. To quote the Prime Minister, it would help to bring them “a lot of money and a lot of jobs in tough times”.

Life wouldn’t just be more pleasant. It would be safer. One thing that does happen “more often in the dusk than in the daylight”, as Boris put it, is crime. Lighter evenings would cut crime, he noted: indeed, the Home Office calculated that year-round Summer Time would cut it by three per cent.

Perpetual summer time is not an outlandish idea. During the Second World War we moved onto Double Summer Time, spending the winter an hour ahead of GMT and the summer two hours ahead. After one huge national inquiry in 1959-60 and another five years later, Harold Wilson brought in year-round Summer Time, which lasted from 1968 to 1971.

Scots have long complained that sticking to BST would mean children going to school in the dark. That is true, though overall, children would gain around 200 hours of useful daylight a year. They’re also far more at risk from accidents when they come back from school in the dark. Safety organisations favour lighter evenings because there are roughly 50 per cent more fatal road accidents during the 4-7pm evening peak than the 7-10am morning one. In the evening, drivers (and pedestrians) are tired and rushing to get home.

When the clocks go back, more of those homeward trips take place in the dark.

Forget the argument that putting the clocks back helps farmers: they hate it as much as anyone else. Japan’s farming sector is twice as large as ours, but Japan hasn’t troubled itself to put the clocks back since the Allies left in 1951.

Forget also the idea that the time switch helps to save electricity and reduce CO2. Climatologist Atsumu Ohmuru (himself Japanese) looked at neighbouring places that did and did not switch – such as the Canadian provinces of Alberta (switches), Saskatchewan (doesn’t) and Manitoba (does) – and found no difference in electricity use. It was the same in Indiana (which has two time zones), and in Switzerland, which, for sheer practicality, started switching along with Germany in 1981.

Lighter evenings are a great way to help our flagging hospitality sector and cheer us all up. “Let’s make the leap into the light,” wrote Boris the Daily Telegraph columnist. Well, Boris the Prime Minister – now would be a very good time.