UK

Martin Stabe London has 73 fires each day – and 161 false alarms

February 13, 2013 2:21 pm by Martin Stabe

The London Fire Brigade has published its incident data for the past four years in the London Data Store, the capital’s open data repository.

The data, originally obtained by the Financial Times under the Freedom of Information Act and published last week in our London Fire Brigade response times map, is being released as open data because of widespread interest in the potential impact of fire station closures.

The London Fire Authority is defying mayor Boris Johnson’s order to put the proposed cuts to public consultation. The £45m cut in the brigade’s budget over two years, would see 12 fire stations, 18 engines and 520 jobs go. Read more

Posted in Data, Freedom of Information Act, UK |

Kate Allen The horsemeat scandal: what the industry is scared of

February 10, 2013 2:46 pm by Kate Allen

The scandal over horsemeat found in processed meat products has echoes of a previous industrial food production crisis.

While the current controversy is not of the same severity, it is interesting to look back at the BSE scandal of the mid-1990s and its effects on consumer behaviour. The BSE saga hit British farming and meat retailing hard, as other countries scrambled to block British meat exports and consumers turned away from beef (despite some politicians’ best efforts). Read more

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Posted in Data, UK |
From FT.com February 8, 2013

Two Conservative-led London councils have joined opposition mayor Boris Johnson’s plan to close or shrink fire stations in their boroughs as part of £48m in budget cuts over two years.

This interactive map shows the speed with London Fire Brigade can currently respond to incidents at the most detailed level ever published.Using the Freedom of Information Act, the Financial Times obtained data on nearly 500,000 incidents that the London Fire Brigade has responded to since introducing its current incident management system in November 2008.

 Read more

Posted in UK |
From FT Explains February 7, 2013

For the past two years, the Financial Times has had exclusive access to the National Pupil Database, which provides anonymous exam performance data for every individual secondary school pupil in England.

Using this detailed data, we have compiled an alternative set of statistics to the traditional measures, which are now set to be reassessed. Read more

Posted in Education |

Chris Cook Reforming league tables

February 7, 2013 7:15 am by Chris Cook

Later this morning, Michael Gove, education secretary, will announce several big things. First and foremost, he is dropping his plan to introduce the EBC, his proposed new qualification for 16 year-olds, which has been attacked as fatally flawed since its announcement. Second, he will unveil details of the new curriculum. Both will deservedly absorb lots of column inches.

But Mr Gove will also announce a new pair of measures by which league tables will be constructed. This change might actually be the most important thing he does during his entire reign. League tables set out the incentives that drive schools. They define success and failure.

So what do we know? Schools will, first, be assessed on the share of pupils getting Cs or better in English and maths. A second measure will record whether children in each school do better or worse than children of similar ability – as measured by standardised tests at the age of 11.

This value-added score will gauge performance across English and maths, as well as three more core subjects and their three best ‘other’ subjects. This replaces the current measure – a crude tally of how many children get Cs or better in English, maths and three other subjects.

 Read more

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Posted in Data, Education, UK |

Kate Allen Day trippers’ delight

February 6, 2013 4:41 pm by Kate Allen
London cable car

(c) Bloomberg

The latest weekly passenger data for London mayor Boris Johnson’s Thames cable car is out – and it’s not good.

The cable car (sponsored by Emirates, and thus officially known as the Emirates Air Line) launched last summer and was billed as a new route for the city’s frazzled commuters, as well as a tourist attraction and a catalyst for regeneration in the areas it serves. It crosses the Thames between the Greenwich peninsula and Silvertown, to the north of Canary Wharf.

The cable car cost £60m to build and will cost Londoners £6m a year to run (Emirates has contributed £36m in sponsorship, spread over 10 years). It can carry up to 2,500 people an hour in each direction* – the equivalent of 30 buses. That equates to a maximum capacity of 65,000 people per day, or 455,000 a week (for comparison London’s busiest Tube line, the Northern, carries nearly a million passengers a day).

But TFL’s passenger figures show that the cable car isn’t getting anywhere near that level of use. On average our calculations suggest it may be* running at just 7 per cent of capacity. Read more

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Posted in Data, UK |
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