Proposal for a DIRECTIVE OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL discontinuing seasonal changes of time and repealing Directive 2000/84/EC

Goals and results

The European Commission has proposed that the practice of daylight saving time be ended from the beginning of 2019. According to the proposal, the bi-annual clock changes would be abandoned throughout Europe.

The Commission's proposal leaves Member States the freedom to decide their standard time. After the decision has been made, they will not be able to switch the time according to seasons. However, Member States will still decide themselves which time zone they want to apply.

Permanent summer-time or winter-time: Framework for impact assessment

VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland has developed a Time System Impacts Excel tool that is a simple framework to assess and compare the potential impacts of different alternative time systems. The framework is made to support further discussion and comparison with easy to use Excel tool, guiding to ask the relevant questions regarding impacts.

First stage is to identify how the scenarios influence the daylight hours, especially during active hours. Second stage is to identify how implementing scenarios would relate to the potential impacts.

The tool can be found below (Documents: Publications and reports).

Starting points

In Finland, the removal of the daylight saving time is based on citizens’ initiative that was introduced to Parliament for discussion in spring 2017. After that, on 15 November 2017, the former Minister of Transport and Communications Anne Berner sent a letter on the daylight saving time to European Commissioner Violeta Bulc. The letter explained the situation in Finland and asked about the Commission’s plans for summer time. On Finland’s initiative, the matter has also been actively brought up at the Council of the European Union.