Appointed to a lectureship at Loughborough University of Technology in 1971 and served as Professor of Economics from 1986 to retirement in 1994. Former appointments were held as Research Fellow and Lecturer at the Queen’s University of Belfast and as an Experimental Officer in DSIR (Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, UK Government).
Professor Fleming acted as a consultant to UK Government Departments (HM Treasury, Office for National Statistics, Department of the Environment, Land Registry), the European Union Statistical Office (Eurostat) and also UK financial institutions including the Halifax and Nationwide Building Societies (for whom he developed the statistical systems for producing their monthly index numbers of house price movements which are widely used for analyses of the economy and housing markets). He also served on the official Retail Prices Index Advisory Committee and the Council of the Royal Statistical Society.
- Industrial economics
- Statistical analysis of housing and construction markets
- Sources and methods of economic statistics.
- Construction and the Related Professions. Oxford: Pergamon Press, on behalf of the Royal Statistical Society and the Social Science Research Council, 1980. ISBN 0-08-024034-8.
- 'The Long-term Measurement of Construction Costs in the United Kingdom', Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A (General), 129, Part 4, 1960 pp.534-556, 1960.
- ‘Conventional Housebuilding and the Scale of Operations: A Study of Prices’, Bulletin of the Oxford University Institute of Economics and Statistics, 29 (2), pp.109-137, 1967.
- Housing in Northern Ireland. London: Heinemann Educational Books, on behalf of the Royal Statistical Society and the Social Science Research Council. 1974. ISBN 0-435-82594-1
- 'The Application of Hedonic Indexing Methods: A Study of House Prices in the United Kingdom', Statistical Journal of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe 3 (3), pp.249-70, 1985 (with J.G. Nellis).