The clocks change tonight: five reasons to keep Daylight Savings Time all year

In the early hours of Sunday morning, clocks fall back an hour, marking the end of British Summer Time. Here are five reasons why daylight savings time should be adopted all year round.

In the early hours of Sunday morning, the clocks jump back an hour, making the mornings lighter and the evenings shorter. Lobbyists have been decrying this chronological curse for years now, urging policymakers to adopt Daylight Savings Time - also called British Summer Time - on a permanent basis, prioritising sunlit evenings over bright mornings. This would essentially align UK watches with clocks on the continent.

In 2011, Conservative MP Rebecca Harris floated a bill calling for year-round daylight savings. A YouGov poll that same year found that 53pc of Britons supported moving clocks forward an hour permanently while 32pc opposed the change. The proposals were met less warmly by the Scottish population; Alex Salmond called the campaign an attempt to“plunge Scotland into morning darkness.”

The complaints are founded; the sun wouldn’t rise until 10am in parts of Scotland. The country’s 1,000-or-so dairy farmers, who wake up before 5am, would have to work for hours in the dark. Other farmers and construction workers, who need sunlight to perform their jobs, would end up working later into the evening.

Of course, we could all just get up an hour earlier in the morning, regardless of time. But as the economist Milton Friedman pointed out, in an analogy for foreign exchange rates, it’s easier to change one thing - the time, in this instance - than dozens of habits of thousands of people.

Here are five economic reasons in favour of Daylight Savings Time.