The government rejected the idea to return the translation of hour hands to Russia

Because it’s not proven that immutable time is bad

The government decided to once again express its opinion on the bill, which proposes to return in Russia the transfer of arrows one hour forward in the spring, and one hour back in the fall. This opinion is negative, follows from the draft official review, approved by the commission for legislative work.

The bill was submitted to the State Duma in June 2023 by deputies from the Communist Party faction Mikhail Matveev, Olga Alimova and Oleg Mikhailov. In the explanatory note, they recall that the seasonal shift of clocks in the spring one hour forward to summer time, in the fall one hour back to winter time was introduced in 1981. In the fall of 2011, under President Dmitry Medvedev, this practice was abolished, and non-removable summer time was established throughout the Russian Federation, and in 2014, under President Vladimir Putin, non-removable winter time was introduced. With him we now live. This led to “a significant reduction (from 16 to 58 percent depending on the region) of the daylight hours effectively used by the population in the period from 18.00 to 23.00,” the explanatory note to the bill says. For the majority of the country’s population, the authors are sure, “changes have taken place for the worse”: there is not enough time for the usual things, due to the early onset of darkness, there is an increase in electricity consumption.

The deputies assure that they receive “numerous appeals from citizens” with a request to provide them with “full daylight hours.” If again on the last Sunday of March we move the arrows one hour forward, and on the last Sunday of October – one hour ago, then the population will have 200 hours more daylight hours per year in the evening, the population’s expenses for paying bills for housing and communal services will decrease, the number of accidents will decrease, it will become safer to walk the streets in the evening, and it will also be easier to carry out construction and agricultural work “due to natural light.” There are no calculations or statistics in the document.

Before submitting the draft law to the State Duma, the deputies sent it to the government to obtain an opinion: the fact is that in the financial and economic justification they wrote that “minor additional expenditures from the federal budget” would be required, and all initiatives that go to the federal budget attempt, it is impossible to bring in without a conclusion. The conclusion of the government, as expected, turned out to be negative. The document stated that the amount of expected additional expenses and the source of the required funds were not given, and the materials for the bill did not say anything about the organizational and technological measures that would need to be carried out in the event of a return to the seasonal switchover: changes in traffic schedules, schedules of communication sessions and television broadcasting, reprogramming of two- and three-tariff electricity meters, not to mention the reprogramming of computers.

Having received such a conclusion, the deputies submitted the draft law to the State Duma, finalizing it with a different financial and economic justification, which stated that no expenditures from the federal budget would be required at all.

The profile Committee on Health Protection has not yet considered the initiative of the deputies from the Communist Party. And in the Cabinet of Ministers they decided to confirm their negative position with an official review of the revised version: its draft, which was reviewed by MK, was approved at a meeting on September 4 by the government commission for legislative work. This time, the main arguments that did not allow supporting the idea of ​​the communist deputies were the lack of a list of the main events that would have to be carried out twice a year during the seasonal switchover, and the lack of data on how much electricity consumption increased, the number of accidents increased, and the safety of citizens decreased. and the indicators of agricultural and construction industries have worsened with the existing unchanged time compared to what the authors propose …