Scottish farmers say they are yet to be convinced by a senior Tory’s call to keep the clocks set at British Summer Time all year round.

Over the weekend, Tobias Ellwood reiterated his long-standing campaign to ditch the switch to Greenwich Mean Time during the winter.

He said that technology had made some of the previous arguments against “double summer” obsolete. 

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Speaking to the BBC’s Westminster Hour, Mr Ellwood said: "I did this study back in 2010 and I concluded that sunlight brightens our day, our lives and lifts our spirits. 

“It makes the world safer and happier.

"And we should utilise this valuable free resource to coincide with the period of our day when it's at the most complex, and we're most busiest and indeed the most dangerous as well.

"And we don't do that.

"What I'd like to see is the clocks stay as they are now. So rather than going back so we have darker evenings that our evening stayed lighter, and I think people would enjoy that more.

"The arguments going back in history are because the farmers required it. They're now obsolete because farming is now a 24-hour industry."

NFU Scotland’s Communications Director Bobby Carruth told The Herald he did not believe “that sufficient justification has yet been given to make a change to the current arrangements.”

"We remain sceptical about some of the arguments that have been offered historically in support of the change and nervous of the potential impacts, but we have always said that we were open to a full, independent analysis being conducted. 

"For our part, we would obviously be particularly interested on the consequences for agriculture and rural communities in Scotland where the impact of winter and summer on daylight hours is most extreme."

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He added: "The effect on agriculture of changing the clocks by an hour has reduced over the years but it is important to bear in mind that, regardless of what the actual time is on the clock, there are only a set number of daylight hours available to farmers in any one day, during which they still have to carry out the bulk of their daily work and enjoy some social life.”

While Mr Carruth accepted that the modern farm was “well lit and increasingly mechanised,” he said there were still a number of dangers from carrying out field operations or handling livestock in darker winter mornings.

"For example, gathering livestock in the morning to go to the market for opening or to a ferry can’t always be delayed by an hour to await sunrise - and a change would also mean more time on the roads for farm and other heavy vehicles in the hours of darkness.

"And given the huge surge in electricity prices, many farmers and crofters are justifiably looking to make maximum use of daylight for work in a bid to control costs.”

Time is a devolved matter for Northern Ireland, but is reserved to Westminster for Scotland and Wales.