Data health

Whether this record is working, and what it can't see. If a source breaks, we would rather tell you than show you last month's version of the town without saying so.

Where the data comes from

The last full rebuild of the site took 11 min 44 s (slowest: section pages built 209 s, street, ward and organisation pages 144 s, paper pages 123 s), finished Wed 30 Sep 2026. It runs after every harvest.

How places are matched

Street and ward pages show food hygiene ratings and planning appeals by fixed rules on their addresses (OPENHASTINGS.md §23). These counts show what the rules miss.

Food hygiene ratings. Of the 911 premises on the Food Standards Agency's register, 762 are placed on a street, and 595 of those on a street with a page here. 648 are placed in a ward by the FSA's map point. 126 have no address (mostly mobile caterers and home businesses, which the FSA doesn't publish), and 23 have an address the rules couldn't place.

Planning appeals. 10 of the 10 appeals in the committee's reports are placed on a street by the address the report quotes.

Who is told when something breaks

Alarms are not switched on yet. When a source fails or needs attention, this page shows it, but nobody is sent a message, so a problem can sit here until someone looks.

What this record cannot see

Every archive has holes. These are the ones we know about:

• Council payments under £250 — Not published. Hastings Borough Council publishes every supplier payment over £250, so the spending page is a floor: smaller payments, and what the council receives, are not on the record.
• Public contracts before August 2026 — Partly visible. Contract notices are collected from both national services, Contracts Finder (for smaller contracts) and Find a Tender (for larger ones), but only from when collection began, so earlier contracts are not on the record. Below-threshold notices reach Contracts Finder at the buyer's discretion, and Find a Tender notices state where their organisations are based rather than where work is delivered, so a contract performed in Hastings by a non-Hastings firm for a non-Hastings body is invisible to us. A Hastings firm appointed to a multi-supplier framework is also not counted: the published value there is the whole framework's ceiling, and no share of it can honestly be attributed to one firm. The money page shows only what we can see, and says so.
• Grants filed under a wider area — Partly counted. We include a grant when the funder recorded it against Hastings, or when the organisation that received it gives a Hastings postcode. Money filed under East Sussex, the South East or nationally, to an organisation based outside the borough, is invisible to us, which is why the money page shows a minimum rather than a total.

How we handle being wrong

Corrections are made in place, with a note saying what changed, and they are logged on the about page.