Lighter Evenings (Experiment) Bill [HL]

My Lords, following the noble Viscount’s sporting analogy, I am very happy to bring the score up to 5-0 in support of the Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Tanlaw. I join others in congratulating him not only on introducing it today, but on his perseverance on the issue over so many years. It is evident that he has a great deal of support in this House and, I think, in the other place. I hope that when my noble friend replies for the Government, he will take note of the degree of support that the measure has. The noble Lord’s timing is absolutely impeccable in getting the Second Reading today with the clocks going forward this weekend. No Member so far in this debate has drawn attention to the fact that this is a very auspicious day for those who are interested in clocks and time-keeping. This morning, His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh is unveiling a memorial in Westminster Abbey to John Harrison, who spent half his creative life inventing the perfect timepiece, accurate to one second a month; he then spent the next 10 years of his life persuading the Board of Longitude to pay him the prize money they promised they would pay him when he invented it. I hope the noble Lord Tanlaw will not have to wait 10 years to get his reward. It is well known in this House that I have a deep affection for and interest in the railways in this country, which I regard entirely as a force for good. I would like to put it on record that it was the railway system in the Victorian age which brought about standard time in the United Kingdom. The Great Western Railway was the first to realise that it could not run a timetable if the time in Bristol was different from the time in London. It adopted a common timetable in November 1840. Other railways followed suit and, by 1847, virtually all were using London time. Indeed, by 1855, the vast majority of public clocks were set to GMT, though some, like the great clock on Tom Tower, which may be familiar to your Lordships who know about Christ Church in Oxford, was fitted with two minute hands, one showing GMT and the other the local time. It may not surprise noble Lords to know that the lawyers were the last group to hold out on standard time. They stubbornly stuck to local time through to 1880. Indeed, you had the extraordinary position where polls in some parts of the country were opening at eight o’clock and closing at four o’clock, while in other parts they were opening at 8.13 and closing at 4.13. Let us get back to the Bill. It is widely known that this issue divides government departments. If it were being debated purely as a road safety measure and was the responsibility of the Department for Transport, it would get a very fair wind. But the Department of Trade and Industry is in charge of time and we know from quite long experience now that it is—shall we say?—a little less enthusiastic about the change to double summer time. Nevertheless, I hope that my noble friend Lord Sainsbury of Turville can offer some comfort to the noble Lord, Lord Tanlaw, and tell the House that the Government are prepared, at least, to offer a fresh review of the issue. The most recent report on the effects of adopting summer time in winter was published by the Transport Research Laboratory back in October 1998, eight years ago. It concluded that if the UK adopted single/double summer time—that is, GMT plus one hour in the winter and GMT plus two hours in the summer—400 fewer people would be killed or seriously injured on our roads. The figures published recently by RoSPA—I declare an interest as a former president of that organisation—and by the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety show that the number of casualties would fall by around 450; that includes between 104 and 138 fewer deaths on the road. The reduction in road accidents affecting schoolchildren is likely to be particularly marked, as over four-fifths of accidents occur after school, when children and, indeed, drivers are likely to be more tired and less alert than they are in the morning. So, an extra hour’s daylight at the end of the day after the schools come out is likely to be very beneficial from the road safety point of view. I do not know whether the Government accept those figures. I am pretty sure that the Department for Transport does. But whether or not they do, surely it is time that we had another experiment of the sort proposed in the Bill, accompanied by new authoritative research showing what the effect on road casualties would be from the change. What the noble Lord, Lord Tanlaw, is proposing is extremely moderate. He is not suggesting that we change irrevocably to double summer time, with no opportunity to switch back; he is proposing a three-year experiment. Neither is he suggesting that Scotland and Northern Ireland, or Wales for that matter, will be dragged, kicking and screaming into adopting these proposals for lighter evenings. Instead, his Bill gives the devolved administrations in those parts of the United Kingdom an opportunity to opt out, if they wish. This is a novel approach to the issue, and I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Tanlaw, on thinking of it. I hope that the whole of the United Kingdom will agree that the proposal makes sense, because I do not think, any more than does the noble Lord, Lord Laing, or other speakers, that the arguments about early morning workers in Scotland, in particular—farmers, those delivering milk, postal workers and so on—are anything like as strong as they may have been in the past, or that the reality is as strong as the prejudiced seem to think that it might be. But, in any event, the Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Tanlaw, gives Scotland the right to choose. That seems to me to be a very sensible compromise. Certainly, when we look at this issue from a business and commercial viewpoint, it is self-evident that we in England do business with many more people in continental Europe than in Scotland. There is strong support for this change for people involved in sport, leisure and tourism, as my noble friend Lady Billingham pointed out. But, for me, the most compelling argument is road safety. We have a good road safety record in this country—a lot better than many others in the world—but we could do better. I am convinced that changing to lighter evenings would make a real difference, particularly in respect of road casualties.