... should we consider having the clocks an additional hour forward all year round, with BST in winter and double summer time in summer?
No.
But wouldn't it "bring the hours of daylight more into line with the hours we are awake", as Tim Yeo argued on Newsnight this evening?
No! Why would it? The thing it's trying to achieve is to make us all rise an hour earlier every day. If the government wants us to do that, then it should open government offices an hour earlier. But why do you assume that people would continue to work the same "clock hours" as today if the clocks changed relative to the daylight? Do you imagine that farmers, for example, would be guided by the clock rather than the daylight? What makes you think that private companies would continue to commence work at 9am rather than 10am?
Would it save enormous amounts of CO2 as we all kept our lights on less time? No! Why would it? Tim Yeo et al are assuming that we would all continue to go to bed at the same clock time as now, instead of adapting our clock-time bedtime to the daylight.
I say it again: if the government wants us all to get up an hour earlier every day - which is the only purpose of putting the clocks forward an hour permanently - then it should pre-announce a date from which government offices will begin to open from 8am instead of 9am; publicly funded news programmes in the evening (e.g. on BBC1) could commence at 5am and 9am instead of 6 and 9; and other such measures.
