The Communication Workers Union (CWU) opposes the Lighter Evenings (Experiment) Act 2005 currently being read in the Lords on grounds of health and safety and acceptable working conditions for our postal members and telephone engineers, especially those in the North of England, Northern Ireland and Scotland.

 

Billy Hayes, CWU General Secretary, said: “The key concern for the CWU is that our delivery workforce of 90,000 postmen and women delivering letters, packets and parcels would not benefit at all from the creation of lighter evenings but would certainly suffer as a result of working on the darker mornings”. 

 

Previous experiments of this sort (1968-71) resulted in large increases in the number of accidents suffered by postal workers, particularly in relation to falls on ice and snow. Productivity also dropped significantly and deliveries arrived later.

 

A particular issue with this Bill is the possibility of England and/or Scotland and Wales voting it through in isolation. Billy Hayes commented: “If that were to happen then we could have the barmy situation of different time zones across the UK. For a nationally run public postal service operating 24 hours a day, such a situation could create unnecessary difficulties and delays which the public and commerce find unacceptable and for which the regulator currently penalises Royal Mail heavily."

 

Dave Joyce, CWU National Health and Safety Officer, added: "The Bill could also seriously affect our British Telecom external engineers whose job involves climbing telegraph poles.  Work at Height is hazardous enough as it is and we don't want our people climbing in the dark. Most of our engineers start work between 7am and 9am and it's a very productive period. Pushing back the time at which it becomes light therefore has the potential to present additional safety and work organisation problems to consider."

 

A move to ‘double daylight saving’  would mean over 1.5 million people spending an additional 10 per cent of their working day in darkness, suffering more accidents and having a reduced quality of working life. Postal workers would form a significant proportion of this total.

 

CWU has a longstanding commitment to campaign to maintain the present system whereby the clocks go forward by one hour in the spring and go back by one hour in the autumn.

 

Since Royal Mail’s change to a single daily delivery in 2005, which allows most postmen and postwomen a later start of around 8am, this proposal poses less of an issue than previously