British Summer Time - Current Statute and Parliamentary Attempts at Change

Current Statute and Parliamentary Attempts At Change

The current arrangement is now defined by the Summer Time Order 2002 which deemed that it would be

...the period beginning at one o'clock, Greenwich mean time, in the morning of the last Sunday in March and ending at one o'clock, Greenwich mean time, in the morning of the last Sunday in October. —The Summer Time Order 2002

This period was stipulated by a Directive (2000/84/EC) of the European Parliament which required European countries to implement a common summer time (as originally introduced in 1997, in Directive 97/44/EC).

In part because of Britain's latitudinal length, debate emerges most years over the applicability of BST, and is the subject of parliamentary debate. In 2004, English MP Nigel Beard tabled a Private Member's Bill in the House of Commons proposing that England and Wales should be able to determine their own time independently of Scotland and Northern Ireland. If it had been passed into law, this bill could have given the United Kingdom two different timezones for the first time since the abolition of Dublin Mean Time (25 minutes behind Greenwich) on 23 August 1916.

In 2005, Lord Tanlaw introduced the Lighter Evenings (Experiment) Bill into the House of Lords, which would advance winter and summer time by one hour for a three-year trial period at the discretion of "devolved bodies", allowing Scotland and Northern Ireland the option not to take part. The proposal was rejected by the government. The bill received its second reading on 24 March 2006; however, it did not pass into law. The Local Government Association has also called for such a trial.

Academic analysis of stock exchange statistics shows that, on average, the FTSE 100 Index rises on the day that the clocks go forward in spring and goes down on the day in autumn when they return to GMT.