Seconds keep millennium on time

Clocks will go back by one second at the beginning of next month to stop the millennium happening too early, a Government spokesman told the House of Lords last night.

Lord Haskel explained that the change, at 1am on 1 July, would be the 31st "leap second" introduced since the UK adopted atomic or Co-ordinated Universal Time (UCT) on 1 January 1958. It was needed to keep Greenwich Mean Time within 0.9 seconds of UCT.