A plan has been announced to move British time in line with European time by moving our clocks one hour forward.
The idea was released as part of a suggested “tourism strategy” and would move British Wintertime one hour forward as currently happens in Summer. This would result in lighter evenings, but would also mean darker mornings with sunrises being one hour later.
The strategy runs into complications the further north you are as the sun rises are later, which is especially apparent in Scotland. Between 1968 and 1971 this idea was first trialled but was shelved due to the number of accidents involving children going to school.
A few example times taking a mid-Winter date of January 15th:
- Current sunrise in London: 8am
- Proposed sunrise in London: 9am
- Current sunrise in Newcastle-upon-Tyne: 8:22am
- Proposed sunrise in Newcastle-upon-Tyne: 9:22am
- Current sunrise in Inverness: 8:47am
- Proposed sunrise in Inverness: 9:47am
As the results show, even in London most school children would be going to school in the dark and most commuters would also be travelling to work before sunrise. December and earlier in January would be even worse.
Possibly recognising that this proposal would not be universally accepted, David Cameron is quoted as saying “It’s up to those who want to make the change to make the argument to try to convince people right across the country that it’s a good thing.”
There are suggestions that British Summer Time would also move an hour forward making Summer sunset times later, and the BBC seems to think this would be the case, but with mid-Summer sunset times as late as 10pm anyway, it might not have any significant advantage.
Possibly co-incidentally, the 18th February is the anniversary of the original 1968 GMT change as we reported last week.
A better BBC graphic represents the problems this is going to cause especially further north.
2 Comments
Since when have school children gone to WORK in the morning? ;-)
Well spotted! Then again, maybe we should just return to the Victorian times and get them working in the factories for their pocket money… :)