Clocking on to British Summer Time

Keeping accurate time is a key aspect of Tensor's products — time and attendance systems are the foundation of the company — and timekeeping is something that is simply an ordinary part of daily routine. With increased use of interconnected digital technology that use automatically updated clocks, it is easy to forget that, twice each year, there are some devices that need to have their clocks moved forward or back one hour — including Tensor's Tensor.NET and WinTA.NET systems.  

As the clocks go forward this weekend and we enter British Summer Time, our blog provides an overview of the UK's daylight saving time. 

The proposal for daylight saving time in the UK was first put forward in 1907 by William Willett, who was upset at — as his self-published pamphlet was titled — 'The Waste of Daylight' on summer mornings: 

"Standard time remains so fixed, that for nearly half the year the sun shines for several hours each day, while we are asleep, and is rapidly nearing the horizon when we reach home after the work of the day is over. There then remains only a brief spell of declining daylight in which to spend the short period of leisure at our disposal." (You can read the whole leaflet here.) 

Willett died in 1915, so never saw his proposal come to fruition the following year, when the UK implemented daylight saving time as a wartime measure after Germany had already put it into effect. It was implemented because longer hours of daylight meant more available time for ammunition production without needing to use electricity for lighting. This industrial and economic reasoning was part of the proposal put forward by Willett, and has remained an argument for the practice ever since.  

British Summer Time has remained in place since 1916, with a couple of deviations: during the Second World War, Double Summer Time was implemented, which had an extra hour forward in both summer and winter, in addition to the usual BST; and as an experiment in 1968 the clocks went forward but were not put back until 1971. The dates for changing the clocks have moved throughout the years, with the current days of the last Sundays in March and October being aligned with an EU directive from 2002. 

Several proposals and campaigns have called for British Summer Time to end over the decades, but it is still in place. BST is generally thought to benefit the retail, sport and tourism industries due to the days staying lighter for longer, as well as saving money on electricity as the days stay lighter for longer. The counter arguments for BST include concerns about darker mornings for children walking to school and farmers starting work, in addition to more accidents in the mornings following the change due to a jetlag-style effect. 

Don't forget to check your own clocks, as well as change the time for Tensor products in Tensor.NET and WinTA.NET systems, on 29 March 2026 (and then back again on 25 October 2026).  

Find out more about British Summer Time at the Royal Museums Greenwich. 

See how Tensor's time and attendance system can benefit your business.