Energy Saving (Daylight) Bill

The Minister has made a most helpful point. Those tactics did spectacularly fail, and I dare say that if he follows the same path as the Conservatives did then, there will be a similar spectacular failure in the May elections. Most recently, Lord Tanlaw introduced a Bill in the House of Lords, which again had all-party support. When I researched the history of the issue under discussion, I was reminded of something that I am unsure whether I ever knew, but if I did I had forgotten it: Greenwich mean time—and, indeed, the very concept of standardised time for a whole country—is a relatively recent concept. At the beginning of the 19th century, different parts of Britain had different time zones, and that caused problems at the advent of the railways. Passengers were not always aware of the time zones according to which the times of the trains were calculated. In 1840, one timetable had to point out that London time was four minutes ahead of Reading time, five and a half minutes ahead of Steventon time, seven and a half minutes ahead of Chippenham time, and so on down the line. When pressed to introduce a standardised timetable for the convenience of passengers, one railway company protested that to do so"““would tend to make punctuality a sort of obligation””." Nothing much has changed. My long-suffering constituents in South Suffolk, hundreds of whom commute to London to work every day—some of them in the dark—have to put up with a franchisee that is called, rather bizarrely, One Railway. It is the linear successor of the company that I have just quoted, and it has exactly the same approach to punctuality—as an obligation that it does not feel inclined to honour particularly frequently.