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Energy Saving (Daylight) Bill

I congratulate the hon. Member for South Suffolk (Mr. Yeo) on both his success in the ballot and the choice of subject of his Bill. I am here to support it, which he will no doubt be relieved to hear, as I am one of its sponsors. As the hon. Gentleman said, the first daylight saving Bill was introduced in 1908, and in my research I found a Staffordshire link, because it was promoted by Robert Pearce, MP for the Leek constituency. Like the hon. Gentleman, I, too, have read ““Saving the Daylight”” by David Prerau, the US co-author of three reports on the effects of daylight saving time. I recognised in the hon. Gentleman’s speech some of the arguments from that entertaining book about why we put the clocks forward. I did not pay for my copy of the book; the author handed it to me personally last year and signed it for me. He is a most entertaining gentleman to meet and to talk to about the subject. Before I cover some of the same ground as the hon. Gentleman in explaining why I support the Bill, I have two preliminary points: first, it is legitimate to legislate about time and, secondly, to do so would not create any more daylight, but merely distribute it differently between the start and end of the day. On the first point, there was a great debate about daylight saving time in the United States in 1993. As Time magazine pointed out, ““chaos of clocks”” reigned because states operated daylight saving time at different times, or did not use it at all. Some Senators put notices on their doors saying, ““This office operates on God’s law””, referring to when there were no clocks and we relied on the sun and the shadow it cast to determine the time. We first interfered with God’s, or natural, law when we introduced mean time with the development of mechanical clocks. Astronomical studies showed that each day of the year was not the same length in every part of the world, so the first artificial adjustment was to adopt a mean time such that the length of an hour was the same throughout the country according to the clock. As the hon. Gentleman noted, the second artificial interference was in the 19th century when standard time was adopted. Typically, noon was set on public clocks around the world by the height of the sun in the sky over each clock, which is why even within Britain there were many time zones, because the sun reaches its height at different times of the day in different areas. The great explosion in railway travel and difficulties in compiling meaningful timetables caused pressure to adopt a standard time, so everybody measured time by Greenwich mean time.