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Daylight Saving Bill

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for paying tribute to his former constituent. It is also worth mentioning Robert Pearce, MP, who was a friend of Mr Willett, and who then took this idea on. Mr Willett was a keen golfer and he was horrified that the golf courses he used closed down when it got dark. He wanted them to stay open. That was the initial thought that put the idea into his head of taking advantage, from a leisure perspective, of the evening sunlight. So we should thank Robert Pearce for first bringing this matter to the attention of the House. I wish to bury some of the myths and some of the headlines that we see in some of the press. We are not putting anywhere in the dark; we are not getting rid of any sunshine in any form. We are transferring light from one part of the day to another—from the morning to the evening. We are saying that, on balance, it is more useful to have that light in the evening than in the morning. Some extreme cases have been mentioned, but for much of the year—nine months of the year—we sleep through this asset. When we awake the sun has been out for an hour or more. If we suppose that an average working day ends at 5.30 pm, a clock change would result in about 300 extra hours of daylight a year in London. The figure for Glasgow would be 175 hours and the one for Shetland, at the very north of the UK, would be 160 hours. That change would be life-changing and would have an impact on everybody. It is useful to have that extra daylight at the end of the evening to do whatever one wants to do.