Forward thinking: why daylight savings is here to stay in UK

The ritual of clock-changing is upon us once again as British summer time begins at 1am on Sunday 26 March, when clocks go forward to 2am. Much of the population gets to lose an hour’s sleep – excluding those who work nights, those who are having a big night out, and those with pets and small children that don’t pay any heed to the clock anyway.

Sometimes known as “daylight savings time”, the clock-change moves the UK to GMT+1, resulting in more daylight in the evenings but less in the mornings. That is great news if you want to go out and do things in the evenings, less so if you have a job where you have to start early.

The stolen hour is given back on Sunday 29 October, when British summer time ends and the clocks go back at 2am to 1am, giving everybody the once-a-year chance to relive an hour. At least in 2023 most electronic devices automatically adjust, although you will probably still be mystified as to how to change the clock on your oven.

The ritual owes its origins in the UK to the first world war. The annual changing of the clock by an hour was first established more than 100 years ago under the Summer Time Act 1916, with the thought that lighter evenings might preserve fuel for the war effort. Despite its arcane origins, there seems little appetite in the UK to change the practice, regardless of there being scant evidence that it particularly contributes to saving energy or boosting the economy

In 2010, a parliamentary report looking at the prospect of permanently shifting an hour ahead concluded that “although we might expect overall energy use to be reduced by extending British summer time, the effects are likely to be small in magnitude … [and] the evidence quantifying these effects is not strong enough to conclude either way what the impact on the overall [energy] demand would be”.

So even though some states in the US and some European countries have been considering ending the concept of daylight savings time, it looks like the clock-change is here to stay in the UK.