Daylight Saving Time was adopted in the UK in 1916 in order to conserve coal during World War One.

The Summer Time Act of 1916 was passed by parliament that year and the first day of British Summer Time was reported as May 21.

It means that between March and October we follow British Summer Time (BST), which is an hour ahead of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), while we follow GMT during the rest of the year.

The change was the brainchild of London builder William Willett who campaigned for years for it to be introduced in the UK.

Mr Willett, the great-great-grandfather of Coldplay singer Chris Martin, came up with the idea in 1907 in a bid to stop people wasting valuable hours of light in the summer months.

He published a pamphlet called The Waste of Daylight in which he suggested clocks should be advanced by 80 minutes over four stages in April, and reversed the same way in September.

In 1908 Mr Willett got the support of the MP Robert Pearce who championed the idea in the House of Commons, but was ultimately unsuccessful.

The campaigner died of the flu in 1915 - a year before Britain eventually adopted his clock-changing plan.

Germany was the first European country to make the changes, in April 1916, with Britain following suit a month later.

This was immediately followed by other countries including Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, and Turkey.

However, the debate over Daylight Saving Time continued.

During the Second World War, Britain adopted British Double Summer Time, which saw clocks being put forward two hours ahead of GMT to give people more time to get home for blackout. The clocks were turned back to GMT at the end of summer 1945.

In a trial known as the British Standard Time experiment, the UK kept Daylight Saving Time hours permanently from February 1968 to November 1971.

The experiment was abandoned in 1972 because of its unpopularity - particularly in Scotland, where days are generally shorter.

The debate raised its head again in 2011 when the Daylight Savings Bill was raised in the UK Parliament.

The private member's bill would have seen the UK adopt Central European Time, with BST plus one hour in summer and GMT plus one in winter.

But determined opposition from MPs meant it failed to make progress within the time limit for debate.