Lighter Evenings (Experiment) Bill [HL]

My Lords, first, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Tanlaw, on his excellent proposal. I am delighted to think about it and I am sure that many others are as well. A point that I think no one has mentioned so far is that, unlike nearly all proposals put before your Lordships’ House, its financial cost is practically nil and its benefits are very obvious. Of course, that is not to say that there are no costs. Being very old, I can remember endless discussion through the latter part of so-called modern history of daylight saving proposals of one sort or another. As several noble Lords have suggested today, they always come to grief on the well known phenomenon of Scottish shepherds. Surely the thing about Scottish shepherds is that there are not very many of them. It is obviously undesirable to sacrifice a small number for a few, but it is probably digestible, provided that the sacrifice is not very great and the benefit to the many is very considerable. In fact, that does not matter because there is no need for them to suffer. The plain fact of the matter is that the service of breakfast to sheep, or whatever the shepherds are getting up for, is not really governed by the clock, as someone pointed out. They will not kick up a fuss if it is not provided at 8 o’clock; they will be quite happy so long as it is provided at 10. This presents the shepherds with a problem; what will they do in the earlier hours before they deliver the sheep’s breakfast? Scotsmen with severe Calvinistic consciences will probably not want simply to lie in bed, as I would in their situation; they will get up and do something such as privately distil malt whisky, fabricate bagpipes or perform other ancient Scottish crafts. There is no reason for them to suffer at all. If anything, it is simply a slight switching of their energies from one direction to another. There is no question of any particular group of human beings bearing the cost of this benevolent proposal, which will benefit many people enormously. We have heard some very interesting remarks about road safety, which have been made with the benefit of knowledge of statistics—something I am in no position to offer. I thought they were quite impressive, but I felt that one more question needed to be asked—it may have been asked already; perhaps I did not register it: as well as comparing the number of accidents that children have going to school with the number of accidents they have coming back from it, in what degree of darkness do those accidents happen? At any rate, it barely seems to need to be statistically demonstrated that various sorts of monsters, to whose attentions children are exposed, particularly when they are out and about in the dark, are more likely to operate in the evening than in the morning. The morning rapist is a fairly rare bird, so far as I know, but they become increasingly common from drinking time onwards in the evening. The same is true of the drug-fuelled youth driving a stolen car, who crashes into children walking from school. These monstrous dangers to children, as opposed to the ordinary and sad wear and tear of ordinary road accidents, would be very responsive to the proposed change in legislation. Such a change would ensure that children are out and about in a properly lit environment when they are not in the immediate vicinity of their homes or under supervision, so I very much hope that people will bear in mind the superb economy and magnificent benefits of the suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Tanlaw.