Chief executives say setting UK on European time would be worth £3.5bn to UK economy

Business leaders have lent their support to aligning the UK’s clocks with Europe in a letter to the Prime Minister on the year’s longest day.

Bosses from companies including the Co-Operative, Eurostar and Kingfisher say adopting the same time zone as the EU would add up to £3.5bn each year to the UK economy by adding three trading hours with Europe and extending the window with the Far East.

With the sun rising today at 4.43am in London and 4.26am in Edinburgh when most people are asleep and setting at 9.30pm when the majority are awake, valuable business hours are being lost, they added in the letter organised by campaign group Lighter Later, an offshoot of 10:10.

Lighter evenings in March and October would benefit the tourism industry, cut road accidents and reduce electricity use and carbon emissions – previous research by the campaign indicates around 447,000 tonnes of CO2 could be saved every winter.

“Better aligning the hours of available daylight with the (later) waking hours of twenty-first-century Britain makes good business sense,” they write.

Lighter Later is also backing Conservative MP Rebecca Harris’ Daylight Savings Bill, which after sailing through its second reading in the Commons last December is about to be scrutinised by MPs as part of the committee stage.

The Bill would require the government to analyse the costs and benefits of adjusting the clocks and run a trial period of the best clock setting. It has high profile political support in the form of David Cameron and the Energy and Climate Change Committee and was included in the government’s proposed Tourism Strategy in February.

The idea has also proved popular in opinion polls, although there are pockets of opposition in Scotland where it is argued that sunrise as late as 10am could delay agricultural work and increase the risk of accidents for children walking to school.