Guernsey Press

Saving the daylight

Deputy Peter Roffey considers the potential social and environmental benefits of switching to British Summer Time permanently

Published
(Picture by Shutterstock)

BRITISH Summer Time is here and I suspect I’m among a vast majority of islanders who feel all the better for it.

Sadly the real spring weather seems a bit slow to arrive this year, but even without it the light evenings are definitely good for the soul. So much so that it has got me wondering, not for the first time, whether adopting permanent BST might be a good idea? Or even, heaven forfend, French time?

Now I am not stupid. I realise that we can’t manufacture more hours of daylight, no matter where we choose to stick the hands on our clocks. But what we can do is make sure that the daylight we do have is at the more useful end of the day. In this respect having daylight in the evenings is so much more beneficial, both socially and environmentally, than in the early morning.

Let’s deal with the social aspects first. The vast majority of people – except perhaps the retired – tend to enjoy their ‘me time’ after work, or after school, or after whatever. So they are far more likely to enjoy recreation in the evenings than at breakfast time. That remains true whether their bag is sport, walking, swimming, gardening or just chilling out.

I know that is not a universal truth. For example, I have been out on early-morning bike rides most days this year, in yet another attempt to tackle my stubborn excess weight. In fact the majority of times have been well before sunrise, and I have to say it has been most enjoyable. Certainly compared with the rest of my regime, which has included giving up alcohol, cheese and bread for three months and feeling perpetually weak through semi-starvation. It hasn’t even worked that well – but I digress very badly.

The real point is that the majority let their hair down at the end of the day, not the start. And if their definition of ‘letting their hair down’ benefits from having daylight then it follows that it is in the evenings that daylight is most useful.

What about the environmental arguments?

Well, when do we use most energy? When we turn on the lights and the heating. The two are related. In the mid-winter we may need heating throughout the day but in many months of the year it is only really once the sun goes down that it turns cold.

A typical family might use their light/heat for an hour or so at breakfast time once they get up in the morning. That wouldn’t change whatever time zone we adopt. But the lighter the evenings the longer it is before they need to switch on the electric lights or resort to whatever form of heating their home uses.

At some times of year it gets even worse. A big majority of us slumber soundly through the early morning daylight, only to then flick on the lights quite early in the evening. It is an environmental nonsense.

No wonder the first thought of deploying ‘daylight saving’ came as a wartime response to limited energy resources. We may not be at war now, but we do have a climate change crisis.

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What are the arguments on the other side of the debate? Other than tradition, a dislike of change, and a feeling that noon simply must be at noon – ‘Anything else would be unnatural, and no good will come of it’.

I suppose the most frequent argument is that darker winter mornings might carry safety risks on our roads. This argument carries little weight in respect of adults because at the moment they simply suffer dark journeys home from work instead. But what about children going to school?

It’s a decent question and I certainly don’t dismiss it lightly. Particularly as I would love to see more kids using active travel and was delighted to see the healthy trend in this respect in a recent survey. But I simply don’t believe it is a game-stopper. After all, we are on pretty much the same latitude and longitude as the Normandy peninsular but I am unaware of a particularly heavy toll of paediatric traffic injuries among the children of the Cotentin during the winter months. I stand to be corrected.

Another issue is whether we could change our time zone unilaterally, or whether we could only do so if the UK chose to do so too. Well, in many ways it would be easier to move in step with the English, but personally I am quite attracted to ploughing our own furrow.

I suspect tourists – practically from the UK – would really like it. They would feel like they were so much more abroad. And we would soon learn to love all the little quirks it would throw up. Like the news at 6 actually being at 7pm.

Perhaps more importantly, what better way to underline that we are NOT a part of the UK and everybody, including His Majesty’s Government, had better remember it. I still recall Nepal putting their clocks forward by 10 minutes just to prove they were separate from India. That was tokenism. By contrast any change here would be done for practical reasons but it would still prove the point over our autonomy.

So am I planning a requete? Nope. I have tried it once. I think it was either 2007 or 2008. So it is someone else’s turn, but if anyone else wants to run with it, they will get my wholesome support.

One more thought. Someone from Jersey said to me, ‘You can do whatever you like, but don’t think you will get us to change our time zone’. So if Jersey didn’t play ball, does that mean the idea couldn’t fly? Not at all. Guernsey can still do its own thing and if any Jersey people in our island don’t like it they can jolly well go home. Not only that, but they could actually get there before they had even left Guernsey.