Birmingham hotel approved

The green light has been given for a hotel in Birmingham, near the NEC.

The Hampton by Hilton hotel will have 203 rooms and will generate new jobs – 25 part-time and 10 part-time – as well as creating a new multi-storey car park with 425 spaces.

Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council approved the plans, submitted by HPREF Mets Birmingham Ltd, at a virtual meeting on the 24th June.

A council document published ahead of the meeting said: “The proposal would be a complementary facility that supports and diversifies its visitor offer at the NEC which would increase its international competitiveness.

“The scale of development would be complementary and in keeping with the surrounding hotel and leisure development within the NEC boundaries.

“The hotel development would bring significant economic benefits in terms of additional employment and investment into the area.

“The proposed hotel and multi storey cark park creates a high quality development that integrates with the existing hotel complex and would significantly enhance the design quality of builtenvironment of the area and setting of the NEC.

“The proposed development would benefit from the presumption in favour of sustainable development and the overall planning balance must be in favour for this proposal.”

A statement submitted to the council on behalf of the applicant added: “The proposed hotel and MSCP would sit well within the existing NEC complex, of which is characterised by large scale buildings.

“The proposed buildings would not cause harm to the visual amenity of the area or appear out of keeping with its context.

“The siting of the hotel and MSCP would ensure ‘visual connectivity’ from the site to the wider NEC complex, with all existing pedestrian routes remaining unaltered.

“The hard and soft landscaping scheme is appropriate to the site and will help to assimilate the development into its context and create a high-quality feel to the development.

“The development will help bolster the provision of good quality tourist accommodation at the NEC and in the wider area.

“Overall, the proposed development is considered to be acceptable in planning terms, being compliant with the Local Plan and the NPPF and there are no material considerations that would indicate otherwise.”

The hotel industry employs a diverse mix of casual, temporary, agency, part time and full-time permanent staff in order to staff the hotel around the clock. If there was ever an industry which suffers from still using paper timesheets to record working hours, it is this one.

Keeping track of shifts, especially on night shifts or other times when the manager isn’t around, is very difficult with high volumes of staff using timesheets. Employees regularly forget to hand in their timesheets by the deadline and agency staff hand theirs straight to their agencies, meaning that sometimes the employer never even sees it to approve it.

This means that there is a very real danger of employees falsifying their timesheets; either just by a few minutes here and there, or outright claiming shifts they were never present for.

Purchasing a workplace management system from Time and Attendance Midlands will solve these authorisation issues. If employees have to clock in at the clocking terminal before entering and leaving, there will no longer be any ambiguity about working hours and no need to sort through hundreds of timesheets at the end of the week or month.

Supervisors and managers can also check all of the timing data for their assigned team members easily within the software, which gets rid of squinting at bad handwriting, and also gets rid of the need to chase people up for handing them in late.

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