Energy Saving (Daylight) Bill

I am making a different point. People have said that greater human happiness will result from an increase in the hours of sunlight that we can enjoy, but evidence suggests that suicide rates are higher when there are more hours of daylight. The simplistic correlation between happiness and changes to the clocks is not borne out by the facts. We are all keen to encourage tourism, but it is over-optimistic to expect Mr. and Mrs. Schmidt in Stuttgart to say over breakfast one morning, ““Look dear, we must go to Britain this year, because it has changed the clocks.”” Equally, I do not expect Mr. and Mrs. Smith in Solihull to say, ““Hey, now they’ve changed the clocks, we won’t pop off to Tuscany this year. Let’s stay in Britain instead.”” Of course we want to encourage people to stay in Britain or to visit, but they will be persuaded to do so by the quality of the accommodation and the welcome that they receive, and those are the issues on which we should focus. I listened with great interest to the argument about the contribution that the change would make to road safety, and we must take the evidence from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents very seriously indeed. We would expect a correlation between the hours of daylight and the number of deaths on the road, but across Europe no such correlation exists. The safest places to drive in Europe are Finland, Sweden and the United Kingdom, despite the much longer hours of winter darkness in those countries. The biggest contribution to road safety has resulted from improvements in roads and in driving standards, the requirement to wear seat belts, and a range of other things. The change could have benefits, but we must be careful not to overplay them. I was intrigued by the suggestion by my hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk that we move to a system of flexi-hours in school. That would be fraught with complications, because there would be cross-boundary issues. For example, some people would be sending one child to a school with an 8.30 start, and another child to a secondary school with a 9.30 start. The change would lead to significant complications for parents, especially if they have teenagers, who seem to live in a completely different time zone. I have come to the conclusion that from the age of 15 or 16 teenagers should make a continental shift to the west, because their body clock is about five hours out of kilter. They go to bed five hours after the rest of us, and they get up five hours later, too, so if they moved one continent to the west, we could address that issue. I accept, however, that it is not what we are considering today. We are all trying to encourage ““walking buses”” in our constituencies, which are good for the environment and for children’s health. If we wish to encourage children to walk to school, we must be cognisant of the danger facing young children if they more often walk to school in darkness. The growth of before-school clubs poses challenges, too. Parents may drop their children off at 8 am when they go to work, although school does not start for another hour and a half or two hours. I accept that my hon. Friend introduced the concept of flexible hours to deal with a particular issue, but it gives rise to significant complications. We have heard quite a bit about the importance of the Bill to business. A great advantage of the City of London is that it straddles the time zones of the east and the west. One of the reasons why so many companies have chosen to come and invest in the UK is that they can work with continental Europe, with some of the countries in Asia and with the US. London’s international position could be threatened by the proposed change—