Counting the Accountability Gap: A National Freedom of Information Census of Public Clock Maintenance in England

Who is responsible for a stopped public clock? This paper reports a national attempt to answer that question empirically, and argues that the pattern of non-answers is itself the finding. Two datasets were assembled. The first is a documented set of 402 stopped public clocks in Britain, collected by field observation and public contribution since 2007 and classified by current custodian; it is a floor, not a census. The second is a census of what English principal councils themselves know: Freedom of Information requests to all 314 principal local authorities, yielding 310 responses of which 187 were substantive, disclosing 566 council-managed clocks of which 70 (12.4%) were stopped. Of the documented set, only 26.4% stand on council-owned buildings, the one category where the Freedom of Information Act compels an answer about maintenance; roughly 74% stand on private, commercial, ecclesiastical or trust-owned buildings, beyond the reach of any public enquiry mechanism. I call this the accountability gap, and I present it strictly as a claim about reach, not cause: for three-quarters of documented failures, a citizen cannot even discover whose job the maintenance was. Direct approaches to some sixty private owners, met overwhelmingly with silence, corroborate the gap from the other side. The stopped public clock is proposed as a countable, photographable proxy for the dissolution of collective maintenance arrangements in the public realm, and the method as a replicable template for measuring accountability reach over any distributed class of shared assets.