Clocks go forward this Sunday. How do they determine what date are clocks go forward, and when they go back?

a good way to remember , is the old saying Spring forward , and Fall back.

In 1996 the European Union (EU) standardized an EU-wide "summertime period." The EU version of Daylight Saving Time runs from the last Sunday in March through the last Sunday in October.

This is regulated in the EU by a Directive that in member States, it begins on the fourth Sunday in March and ends on the fourth Sunday in October-originally introduced in 1984 (give or take a year). The Uk had to adapt by extending the start of "daylight saving" from the second Sunday in March, to the fourth- a further week each year until it achieved harmony. In practice the UK (and possibly Eire and Portugal) lost at least two weeks of daylight saving-which given today's problems of carbon emissions, should be reviewed and probably amended to harmonise with Canada and the USA who extended their "daylight saving" by one week in the autumn (first Sunday in November) and three weeks in the spring (first Sunday in March), thus saving at least one and a half million carbon emissions.

Why oh why do we have to put up with the clocks being put back seven weeks before the shortest day and being put forward again fourteen weeks after. Why can't we have an even split? Seven before and seven after. J Winter

It's always the last weekend in march and october

I have just found this explanation. Although not punctual in the modern sense, ancient civilisations adjusted daily schedules to the sun more flexibly than modern DST (Daylight Saving Time) does, often dividing daylight into twelve equal hours regardless of day length, so that each daylight hour was longer during summer. For example, Roman water clocks had different scales for different months of the year: at Rome's latitude the third hour from sunrise, hora tertia, started by modern standards at 09:02 solar time and lasted 44 minutes at the winter solstice, but at the summer solstice it started at 06:58 and lasted 75 minutes. After ancient times, equal-length civil hours eventually supplanted unequal, so civil time no longer varies by season. Unequal hours are still used in a few traditional settings, such as some Mount Athos monasteries and some Jewish ceremonies. During his time as an American envoy to France, Benjamin Franklin, author of the proverb, "Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise", anonymously published a letter suggesting that Parisians economise on candles by rising earlier to use morning sunlight. This 1784 satire proposed taxing shutters, rationing candles, and waking the public by ringing church bells and firing cannons at sunrise. Franklin did not propose DST; like ancient Rome, 18th Century Europe did not keep precise schedules. However, this soon changed as rail and communication networks came to requirestandardisationion of time unknown in Franklin's day.

The Ninth European Parliament and Council Directive on Summer Time Arrangements states that summer (or daylight saving) time will be kept between the last Sunday in March to the last Sunday in October. The changes will take place at 01.00 GMT.

More to the point - why do we do it at all? If people want to take advantage of extra daylight they can do what our ancestors did and work by the sun. From my perspective it means that, having just got past the point where the rising sun shines in my face on the drive to work and the setting sun hits me on the way home, the government resets the day so that it happens all over again for 3 or 4 weeks. Or at least it would if it wasn't damned well raining most of the time. :o(

The government determines when the clock goes back and forward. In the United States, it's a federal responsibility. In Canada, it's a provincial responsibility.