The story was based on comparing FOI responses on zero hour staffing with official overall staffing figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA). However, some figures showed some institutions as having more zero hour staff than staff overall, so we called up HESA to find out why those numbers weren’t adding up.

The answer may lie in how staffing is counted by HESA. The ‘definitions‘ link on that staffing data above specifies that:

“Atypical staff are those members of staff whose contracts involve working arrangements that are not permanent, involve complex employment relationships and/or involve work away from the supervision of the normal work provider. For atypical staff only a minimum data set is required.”

In some cases zero hour staff may come under this category. On the same topic:

“Staff employed under consultancy contracts, or on the basis of payment of fees for services without a contract of employment are not included in the record.”

We were told, however, that zero hour contracts would not come under those categories.

So we requested the data for atypical staff in the Midlands – and here they are (look out for the notes at the end – zero doesn’t necessarily mean none):

Some notes:

• All figures have been subjected to HESA’s standard rounding methodology (0, 1, 2 are rounded to 0. All other numbers are rounded up or down to the nearest multiple of 5).
• Definitions for the Staff Record can be found here.
• University College Birmingham (insitution code 0200) has asked that their individual level data not be released at this time.
• The data above provides a breakdown of the totals published online here.

“Of 82 of the biggest housing developments in 10 major cities [just] 40% complied with local affordable housing targets. Other than Birmingham, the cities where at least 50% of housing schemes failed to meet local affordable housing targets were Bristol, Bradford, Cardiff, Manchester and Sheffield.

We’ve extracted the parts of the BIJ data (published here) that deals with large developments in Birmingham and the renegotiation of agreements in the West Midlands – and published it in two tables below.

You can also find the Birmingham data in a Google spreadsheet here, and the West Midlands data here.

A background to how the BIJ investigated housing can be found here.

What else can you find out about the developments, or about housing in the Midlands? Let us know if we can help.

Data: the biggest developments in Birmingham

Data: housing agreements in the West Midlands

• What data does the Fire Service collect? Notes from a datablog meetup
• Understanding probation and justice data – notes from a @bhamdatablog meetup

However, since Buzzdata closed, we’ve had nowhere to host our data, so I’ve decided to launch a separate blog just to provide links to local data, writeups of meetups (up till now published on the general Help Me Investigate blog), and other ‘inside baseball‘ stuff that doesn’t fit elsewhere.

Let me know what you’d like to see from the site, and the project as a whole.