Last Sunday, the 27th of March at 1:00 am, the clocks went forwards an hour and British daylight Savings time began. But does this have any purpose or is it just an unnecessary nuisance reducing our sleep? 

As you are presumably aware, the clocks change biannually: moving one hour forwards in late March and one hour backwards in October. British Summer Time (BST) is the period of time between these two dates. BST was first thought of by William Willett at the start of the 20th century. His original proposal was that the clocks should be moved 80 minutes forwards by 4 separate, 20-minute intervals, which was never used, however during WWI BST was introduced for the first time as a means to keep munitions factories open longer. It was also used during WWII with British Double Summer Time being enacted in 1941, in which the clocks were turned forward by 2 hours. 

However, in the present day, there is much debate around whether this is necessary anymore. It is thought that BST is useful for reducing energy consumption by increasing the hours of light in the evening when most people need it most. It also encourages people to get more active during the evenings, improving their activeness as well as boosting the tourism industry by letting people go out for longer in the evenings. Yet, many people argue that changing the clocks by an hour disrupts our natural sleep cycle and costs too much money. As well as this, with the advent of more modern forms of lighting, energy savings during BST are actually negligible. 

Despite this, it appears that William Willett and BST will be staying around for a long time.