It’s that joyous time of the year when pretty much everybody in the UK gets an extra hour in bed, as the clocks go back at 2am on Sunday 28 October with the end of British summer time. Joyous, of course, unless you are a parent of small children, own pets, are working a night-shift over the weekend, or don’t like the trade off of earlier sunsets for a bit more morning light.
2018 may mark one of the final times that the continent of Europe changes the clocks back in unison with the UK – or indeed at all, as moves are afoot to abolish daylight saving time in the EU.
Since 2002, EU Directive 2000/84/EC has regulated the time change between winter and summer time in the EU, stating that the last weekend in March and the last weekend in October should be the switchover dates. But a 2017 report by the European parliament into the practice has led to the European parliament voting that daylight savings time arrangement be reconsidered, allowing member states to opt out of changing their clocks. Some non-EU European countries, like Russia, Turkey, Belarus and Iceland, have already abandoned the practice.
The argument in favour of the harmonising the clock change across the EU is that it helps the single market to function, and is beneficial to the transport sector, especially cross-border, while also making some energy savings.
But scientists and politicians have become increasingly worried on the impact it has on the human sleep cycle. In 2016 an investigation by the German Bundestag concluded that “the process of adaptation to the time change might be more difficult for some people than has been assumed in earlier years”.
Researchers had previously thought that the clock change, particularly in spring, caused people to suffer minor jet-lag style symptoms for a couple of days after the change. They now think, according to the Bundestag report, that the effects can last up to four weeks, and that “for some people the process of adaptation itself takes place only insufficiently or not at all”.
There’s little indication that there is long-term damage to people’s health through the clocks changing, and some argue that lighter evenings increase the time available for sport and leisure activities, which for many people would outweigh the negative effects of the change. The report called for further research, but before that has happened Lithuania asked the European commission to act. A public consultation found 80% of people in favour of abolishing the clock changes, and that is what the European commission is now recommending that member states do.
While not the highest consideration in Brexit talks over the Irish border, it raises the possibility that in the future Dublin could have to choose between abolishing daylight savings time and creating a time-zone border with Northern Ireland, or retaining it and being out of step with the time zones of some fellow EU states.
Changing the clocks seems set to stay in the UK. It is just over 100 years since the concept of changing the clocks was introduced by the 1916 Summer Time Act, and there doesn’t appear to be any great groundswell of opinion among British politicians about changing domestic arrangements for British summer time.