Do you support the Lighter Later campaign?

What would you do with an extra hour of daylight in the evenings, Lighter Later campaigners are asking.

The 10:10 climate change campaign has launched its Lighter Later campaign to change the clocks so Britons gain an extra hour of daylight in the evenings, all year round. That means shifting to Greenwich mean time (GMT) plus one hour in winter and GMT+2 hours in summer.

A day in summer, under 10:10’s proposals, would feel much the same in the morning but, in the evening, there would be an extra hour of daylight, until 10 p.m. In winter, mornings would stay darker for longer but evenings would get darker an hour later.

Changing daylight hours has been tried in the past. During the second world war, British clocks were set an extra hour forward throughout the year to increase productivity and save energy. Between 1968 to 1971, the UK tried GMT+1 all year round, too, in an experiment.

GMT started as an aid for sailors to measure longitude, and was adopted as the official UK time in 1880. In 1916, the Summer Time Act moved clocks forward for an hour between May and October, thanks to the campaigning of an English builder called William Willett, to saving coal for the war effort.

In the UK, recent attempts to change times have hit brick walls. The most recent effort, the 2006 Energy Saving (Daylight) Bill, called for a three-year experiment to advance clocks by an hour but was not passed by Parliament.