EU STATES CONSIDER ABOLISHING DST

The European Parliament voted in favour of backing the EU Committee draft directive to stop the one-hour clock change in the European Union last March 2019. DST proved unpopular in the EU by a 2018 public survey, with more than 80% of 4.6 million respondents voting to put an end to seasonal clock changes.
Soon after, the European Commission issued a draft directive to permanently scrap DST in the EU by April 1st, 2019 – no joke!
The original draft proposed that the last EU-wide clock change would be setting clocks forward one hour on Sunday, March 31, 2019. In the meantime, each Member State should have decided whether to remain permanently on “summer time” or to change their clocks back one final time to permanent standard time on Sunday, October 27, 2019.
However, basing an EU legislative change merely on a popular vote caused several Member States to raise timely concerns. The initial plan proved to be too ambitious as several EU Member States called for more time before putting an end to the practice. The main issue voiced in the draft compromised the proposal that the April 1st 2019 deadline was “too ambitious”.
A number of EU Member States called for more time and impacted assessments to be conducted before putting an end to setting clocks back and forth for Daylight Saving Time (DST). In the compromise, this deadline has been pushed two
years ahead, to April 1st 2021. The aim is still to end DST by repealing Directive 2000/84/EC.