Category Archives: data

Get the data: ‘atypical’ staffing in Midlands universities

The University and Colleges Union (UCU) recently revealed that more than half of higher education institutions in the UK use controversial zero hour contracts.

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: Continue reading

Birmingham missing affordable housing target – get the data

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has found that ”none of Birmingham’s biggest housing developments meet its 35% affordable housing target”.

“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.

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. Continue reading