Stop changing the clocks. Nobody wants this, and the evidence is in

In two weeks, at 2am on the last Sunday of October, Britain will do something that no serious person any longer believes is sensible. We will set our clocks back an hour, plunge the evenings into darkness at half past four, and spend the following week being tired, irritable and slightly more likely to be hit by a car. Then, in March, we will do the reverse and feel terrible again. We have done this since 1916. It is time to stop.

The case for the twice-yearly change rests on a set of assumptions about farmers, schoolchildren and energy that were questionable when they were made and are now simply false. Farmers, the group most often invoked, have been telling anyone who will listen for decades that cows do not read clocks and that the change is a nuisance. Energy savings, the justification for wartime introduction, have been measured repeatedly and found to be negligible or negative. The modern economy runs on lighting and screens that do not care what the sun is doing.

What is not negligible is the harm. The week after the clocks go forward in spring sees a measurable rise in heart attacks, road accidents and workplace injuries, the predictable result of a population of 67 million people being collectively jet-lagged. The autumn change is gentler on the body but worse for the mood: the sudden loss of evening light is associated with a spike in reports of seasonal low mood, and the dark commute home correlates with a rise in pedestrian deaths in the following weeks that reverses when the clocks go forward again.

The question that always follows is which time we should keep, and here the debate becomes unnecessarily tangled. The honest answer is that it matters less than the change itself. Permanent summer time would give the whole country lighter evenings all year at the cost of dark mornings in the Scottish winter, which is a real objection but a manageable one. Permanent winter time would be closer to solar noon and better for sleep, at the cost of 9pm sunsets in June. Either would be better than the current arrangement, which gives us the worst of both and a biannual hangover.

The European Union voted to abolish the change in 2019, then failed to agree on which time to keep and quietly shelved the whole thing. Britain could simply decide. It would be one of the very few policies with no cost, no losers and the support of almost everyone who has ever stood at a bus stop in the dark at 4.45pm wondering what happened to the afternoon. We have better things to argue about. Let us just stop.

Imogen Fairley is a Daily Meridian columnist