Many of us have been working from home during the pandemic and have adjusted the hours of our working days to suit our lives. The pandemic has, thus, given us an opportunity to create a working day that fits in with our lives. For most of us this mean planning each working day around daylight hours. My solution to maintaining this positive change after the pandemic ends is to adopt a proposal championed by many groups including the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) and environmental campaigners 10:10, that British Summer Time (BST) be maintained during the winter months, and that a “double summertime” be applied to the current British Summer Time period, putting the UK one hour ahead of GMT during winter, and two hours ahead during summer. This proposal is referred to as “Single/Double Summer Time” (SDST), and would effectively mean the UK adopting the same time zone as European countries such as France, Germany, and mainland Spain (Central European Time and Central European Summer Time). RoSPA has suggested this would reduce the number of accidents over this period as a result of the lighter evenings. There was an experiment to maintain BST for the entire year in the early 1970s which was dropped following opposition from some groups including, I believe, some Scottish farmers but I have read that the NFU is no longer against Single/Double Summer Time, with many farmers expressing a preference for the change. Added to this there is the potential energy benefits of Single/Double Summer Time and its environmental benefits. It has been argued that the change could save almost 500,000 tonnes of CO2 each year, equivalent to taking 185,000 cars off the road permanently ‚’ a change that is good for the environment and for us too.
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