House of Commons

Friday 26 January 2007

Energy Saving (Daylight) Bill

Robert Key (Salisbury) (Con): I strongly support my hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk (Mr. Yeo) in introducing the Bill. I hope that it will receive a Second Reading so that it can go into Committee for the detailed scrutiny that Members on both sides of the House say it deserves. So far, my hon. Friend has won all the arguments. The debate has been a pale shadow of the one 11 years ago when my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, West (Sir John Butterfill) sought to bring in a similar Bill. A three-year experiment of single/double summer time would be sensible. It would involve moving the clocks forward one hour throughout the year: Greenwich mean time plus one in winter and GMT plus two in summer.

I have no pretensions to represent Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. In my constituency, we take the long view, so speaking as the Member of Parliament for Stonehenge, I point out that we have particular views about the length of day. There has been much misapprehension—all those happy campers who want to celebrate the summer solstice at Stonehenge on 21 June must be deeply disappointed to learn that our forebears well understood that the winter solstice was the important one. The significant date was21 December, and the placing of the Heel stone was based on that date. What really mattered was where the midwinter sun rose, because that marked the dawn of the new year, the change of the seasons and the prospect of more food so that people could survive.

Taking the long view, I remind the House that in terms of mother nature, goddess earth, druid beliefs or anything else, the immutable fact of life is that what we do and say today has no bearing whatever on what geography dictates. That misapprehension has surfaced in speech after speech today from our colleagues from Scotland.

It would of course be better if we could do as our forebears did. I am sure that we should all be happier, more sensible, more balanced and have better judgment if we rose with the sun and went to bed at sundown. That, however, is not an option in the 21st century.

Mr. MacNeil: Would not the hon. Gentlemen’s suggestion mean that in some parts of the UK people would be awake for only four or five hours a day, and others in bed for 19 hours?

Robert Key: Indeed, which is exactly why I made my last point.

I am grateful to the hon. Member for Edinburgh, North and Leith (Mark Lazarowicz), who has adopted the mantle of John Maxton—the former Labour Member for Glasgow, Cathcart, now Lord Maxton. In the debate 11 years ago, John Maxton completely demolished the argument of most Scottish prejudice against changing to the sort of daylight saving pattern proposed in the Bill. I recommend that enthusiasts for the cause read his speech, which was masterly.

Mr. Russell Brown: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Robert Key: I am delighted to give way to another Scot.

Mr. Brown: I appreciate that and I say to the hon. Gentleman that some of us are not normally here but many miles north on a Friday. This is not about prejudice. The Bill lays out a choice and Members who do not represent English constituencies have to reflect on it. Quite frankly, it is a Hobson’s choice: do we want to use the extra daylight hours as others would wish, or are we going to be left in a different time zone, which will confront us with other difficulties? I say again that that applies particularly to an area such as mine—right on the border.

Robert Key: I would make two points. First, I have listened with almost disbelief as Labour Scottish Member after Labour Scottish Member has said how much they dislike devolution and how they are not prepared to trust the Scottish Parliament to make a judgment on this issue. It is very instructive—

Rosemary McKenna rose—

Robert Key: No, I certainly will not give way to the hon. Lady.

My second point in response to the hon. Member for Dumfries and Galloway (Mr. Brown) is that many millions of people all around the world who live close to time zones—I accept that there are some difficulties about where the boundary falls—manage perfectly well. As for the broadcasting argument, perhaps some Members never watch Sky News, CNN or BBC News 24, but it does not really matter whether they are watching at 5 o’clock or 6 o’clock. I am bound to say that the broadcasting argument is not a strong one.

I support the Bill for straightforward reasons. First, it saves lives. Like my right hon. Friend the Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young), I used to be a transport Minister, though a very junior animal in comparison with him. I was the Minister with responsibility for roads and road safety and I heard the same arguments as the current Minister with responsibility for roads, which have been repeated today. The fact that we can prevent another 200 deaths a year and a further 200 serious accidents seems to me to be a very good reason that we cannot ignore, especially when we have advice from such august bodies as the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, the Child Accident Prevention Trust and the National Association of Head Teachers. We would do well to listen to them. The fact that the Bill will save lives is a really important consideration.

Mr. MacNeil: I remind the hon. Gentleman of the experience—the actual rather than the hypothetical experience—of Portugal, where Portuguese insurance companies subsequently reported a rise in the number of accidents.

Robert Key: I am absolutely fascinated to discover that the Scottish nationalists are more interested in what happened in Portugal than in the evidence of what happens in the UK. The fact is that the evidence is there—as the current Minister has said—for England and Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland. Frankly, I am more interested in that evidence than in what happened in Portugal a few years ago.

Nick Harvey: On that particular point, will the hon. Gentleman note that Portugal is considerably to our west and that when they ran that experiment they were effectively the best part of two hours ahead of their geographical time zone when we are proposing only one hour?

Robert Key: Of course the hon. Gentleman is right. It is also right that we have a peculiar view of the geography of Europe in this country. The fact is that the Greenwich meridian almost goes through Bordeaux and Madrid, and I would much rather be aligned with all the major economies of Europe. As the hon. Member for North Devon (Nick Harvey) implies, that is a far more telling argument than what happened in Portugal.

My next reason for supporting the Bill is that it saves energy. The evidence is there that we can save 3 per cent. of our energy. Whether or not we are in favour of nuclear power, windmills or whatever, what actually matters is that we use less energy. As the experts tell us, the Bill will encourage us to use up to 3 percent less energy. The peaks of energy consumption will be lower, we will reduce carbon emissions and we will cut fuel bills.

My next reason is that the tourism industry is in favour of the Bill. When the hon. Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch, East (Rosemary McKenna) told us that there was no pressure from industry to support the Bill, it is obvious that she has not read much of the briefing—I suspect it was sent to her as to all of us—showing that 200,000 tourism businesses in the UK, including those in Scotland, specifically support it.

Mr. MacNeil: A few moments ago, the hon. Gentleman was arguing for carbon reduction, but now he is arguing for carbon increase.

Robert Key: Not at all. I am talking about the importance of tourism and I am not sure that that is an argument for carbon increase. One thing I would like to do is encourage more people to go on holiday in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland rather than fly off to the sun. I would have thought that the hon. Gentleman would embrace that, but he does not seem to be encouraging such tourism in his constituency, which surprises me—but there we are.

My next reason for supporting the Bill results from the impact that it will have on business. I am astonished that Scottish Members of Parliament here today seem to think that the financial services industry in Scotland would not benefit from coming into the same time zone as the rest of its major competitors, notably Frankfurt, and that it does not suffer from the current muddle that disadvantages the City of London and Edinburgh. People in the United States, China, India and all around the world simply cannot understand why the major financial capital of the world can be in a different time zone from other European financial capitals, such as Frankfurt.

Mr. MacNeil: To turn that argument on its head, why is there no pressure on the likes of Frankfurt for them to change into the same time zone as the major economic capital of London?

Robert Key: Because those financial capitals are running their economies closely to natural times and time zones, whereas we are distorting further than we need to distort. It is very straightforward. I would rather we went in the direction proposed.

I also want to take head on the argument about farmers. I am sure that if you represent farmers, Madam Deputy Speaker, you will appreciate that they do not pay any attention to clocks. They pay attention to the time that the sun rises and sets and to the needs of their stock. That, not what the clocks says, determines when a farmer gets up, and we need to bear that in mind. It is significant that the National Farmers Union has changed its view and now supports the Bill. We should bear in mind that very great change.

On the Scottish question, I want to draw the attention of the House to the fact that I was working during the last trial between 1968 and 1971. Perhaps my hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk was working too. I was working in Scotland—I was a teacher in Musselburgh. In the winter before the trial took place in Scotland, there were no games in the afternoon. We could not hold them; it was dark. When the trial was on, teachers across Scotland were able to organise sports, coach athletics and, above all, get children outside and exercised. I am proud of being a Scottish-registered teacher, but when I came to teach in England, I found that doing all that was so much easier. I look back with horror on the dark afternoons when there was no sport for hundreds of thousands of children in Scotland. The proposal would be of enormous benefit to them.

Of course, Scotland could opt out, and my hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk has introduced a sensible arrangement for that. I doubt that it will. It is important to remember that there will always be far fewer hours of daylight in Scotland in winter than in England. It does not matter whether we get our six hours of daylight from 8 am to 2 pm or at any other time, except for the statistical arguments in favour of things such as safety and energy consumption.

Nothing can change the length of the day or the night, but the English look with envy at the considerable hours of daylight in Scotland in mid-summer. I have never heard one of my constituents being chippy about all the extra daylight that the Scots get in summer. I hope that that attitude will be reciprocated. Thank goodness—vive la difference. It is wonderful that we can have different hours of daylight. That is one reason that I would never like to live in the tropics where there are no seasons and 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness throughout the year. Thank goodness for a bit of difference.

The Bill is sensible, practical and logical. We should allow it to go through to Standing Committee for closer scrutiny.