Letters | 5 November 2011

• Clock watching

Sir: Peter Hitchens’s cover story ‘Hour of Surrender’ (29 October) was predictable, reactionary and dangerously short-sighted. The argument for changing the clock is simple: daylight is a limited and valuable resource — to maximise the benefits afforded by daylight, we should have more of it in evenings when we are most active rather than in the mornings when we are asleep. Nowhere is this more true than on our roads, where Mr Hitchens has a particular blind spot to the evidence. The UK’s leading road safety bodies (including the Scottish branch of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents) are unanimous: when it comes to road safety, children are more at risk on the way home from school (when they take longer, less direct journeys) than in the morning (when they go straight to school). Mr Hitchens may be a fine journalist, but he is no statistician.