British Summer Time

During British Summer Time (BST), civil time in the United Kingdom is advanced one hour forward of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) (in effect, changing the time zone from UTC+00:00 to UTC+01:00), so that evenings have more daylight and mornings have less. BST begins at 01:00 GMT on the last Sunday of March and ends at 01:00 GMT (02:00 BST) on the last Sunday of October. Since 22 October 1995, the starting and finishing times of daylight saving time across the European Union have been aligned – for instance Central European Summer Time begins and ends on the same Sundays at exactly the same time (that is, 02:00 Central European Time, which is 01:00 GMT). Between 1972 and 1995, the BST period was defined as 'beginning at two o'clock, Greenwich mean time, in the morning of the day after the third Saturday in March or, if that day is Easter Day, the day after the second Saturday in March, and ending at two o'clock, Greenwich mean time, in the morning of the day after the fourth Saturday in October.' The following table lists recent-past and near-future start and end dates of British Summer Time: British Summer Time was first established by the Summer Time Act 1916, after a campaign by builder William Willett. His original proposal was to move the clocks forward by 80 minutes, in 20-minute weekly steps on Sundays in April and by the reverse procedure in September. In 1916, BST began on 21 May and ended on 1 October. Willett never lived to see his idea implemented, having died in early 1915. In the summers of 1941 to 1945, during the Second World War, Britain was two hours ahead of GMT and operating on British Double Summer Time (BDST). To bring this about, the clocks were not put back by an hour at the end of summer in 1940; in subsequent years, clocks continued to be advanced by one hour each spring and put back by an hour each autumn until July 1945. The clocks were brought back in line with GMT at the end of summer in 1947. An inquiry during the winter of 1959–60, in which 180 national organisations were consulted, revealed a slight preference for a change to all-year GMT+1, but instead the length of summer time was extended as a trial. A further inquiry during 1966–1967 led the government of Harold Wilson to introduce the British Standard Time experiment, with Britain remaining on GMT+1 throughout the year. This took place between 27 October 1968 and 31 October 1971, when there was a reversion to the previous arrangement. Analysis of accident data for the first two years of the experiment, published by HMSO in October 1970, indicated that while there had been an increase in casualties in the morning, there had been a substantially greater decrease in casualties in the evening, with a total of around 2,500 fewer people killed and seriously injured during the first two winters of the experiment, at a time when about 1,000 people a day were killed or injured on the roads. However, the period coincided with the introduction of drink-driving legislation; the estimates were later modified downwards in 1989. The trial was the subject of a House of Commons debate on 2 December 1970 when, on a free vote, the House of Commons voted by 366 to 81 votes to end the experiment.