On the night of 28-29 October, we are setting clocks back one hour from daylight saving time to wintertime from 3 a.m. to 2 a.m. The time change is mentioned in a European Union directive from January 2001, which is in force without time limit: “From 2002 onwards, the summertime period shall end in each Member State at 1.00 Universal Time (GMT), on the last Sunday in October.”

In Poland, the time change is regulated by a decree of the Prime Minister of 4 March 2022. For the next five years, unless the European Commission revisits its work on abandoning the time change, winter and summer time will remain in force.

The discussion on the legitimacy of time change in the European Union has been ongoing for several years. A public consultation conducted by the European Commission among Europeans in 2018 showed that 84 % of respondents were in favour of abandoning time change. They collected 4.6 million responses (the highest number ever). An IBRiS poll for Radio ZET, conducted in October 2022, found that almost 80 % of Poles are against switching to wintertime.

Work on the transition away from time changes was suspended at European level even before the pandemic. Issued every five years for the next five years, the Communication from the European Commission introduces a common date and time for the start and end of summertime in all Member States.

Summertime arrangements were introduced by European countries in the last century with the aim of saving energy, particularly in times of war and during the oil crisis of the 1970s. Today, in economic terms, time changes mean mainly costs. They are particularly noticeable in logistic systems – where shift work is used or in electronic systems conducting financial transactions on a global scale.

Arkadiusz Słomczyński