The UK economy is in recession, with some shocking figures floating about – but it's not all doom and gloom, writes Andrew Large.

It may seem odd, with empty buildings and much talk of closures and redundancies, to speak of a time of opportunity for the cleaning sector. And yet that is exactly where we are. The opportunities for cleaning in the months and years ahead are significant. What is needed is the courage to seize them.

Cleaning is essential

The cleaning sector is better placed than many to weather the economic storm. Unlike, say, construction or car manufacturing, cleaning does not suffer from great swings in volume. UK new car sales are over 30% down in comparison with 2008, but the situation for cleaning tends to mirror that of GDP.

This is largely for two reasons. First, cleaning is ubiquitous. It occurs in every office, every school, every hospital and every factory. It also occurs every day, and that combination of being regular and widespread gives a significant robustness against drops in demand. Second, cleaning is an essential activity. Whereas companies can choose to purchase new premises or vehicles, they really have little choice as to whether or not they clean. Dirty buildings are not going to prove popular with the people who work in them, nor their clients.

So, cleaning may be insulated to an extent from the world economy - but the challenge to grow the business in these difficult times remains.   

Growth opportunities in hygiene

The 2009 outbreak of swine flu is of great concern, but it also shows the vital importance of hygiene in all our lives - and provides an opportunity for the cleaning industry to demonstrate how it can add value to client businesses. Correctly applied hygiene practices will undoubtedly reduce infection rates, and that will almost certainly save lives, reduce sickness and minimise the damage to the UK economy.

In the current situation, cleaning businesses should be actively approaching their clients to offer their services in the management of the effects of any forthcoming pandemic. The sort of thing that cleaning businesses can offer includes:

• Advice on good hygiene practices that reduce infection risk
• Supply of tissues both for office desks and in sachets for workers to carry with them
• Reinforcing the CATCH IT, BIN IT, KILL IT message
• Ensuring extra supplies of soap and hand drying equipment
• Supplying hand sanitizer gels to clients
• Ensuring hygienic disposal of tissue waste

• Adjusting cleaning specifications and frequencies so that surfaces (tables, desks, door knobs, light switches, keyboards, phones etc) are regularly cleaned with a disinfectant cleaner with accredited virucidal claims. (And by regular I mean several times a day.)

Any pandemic is a danger. If the cleaning industry acts quickly in advising its clients what to do, then it has the potential to dramatically reduce infections. And that is a real benefit to society as a whole.

Hopefully, swine flu will pass without serious consequence; but it is an important symbol of the impact poor hygiene can have on all our lives. Perhaps this is a wake-up call for society at large to understand the risks we run every day, through coughs and colds, stomach upsets, norovirus and seasonal flu. Good hygiene and cleaning practices won’t make these go away, but they will very much help to mitigate the effects. If one of the consequences of swine flu is that everyone takes their personal hygiene a bit more seriously, then this is no bad thing and a real opportunity for the cleaning industry as well.

Creating Sustainability

Hygiene promotion is only one of the opportunities currently before the cleaning industry. A second major opportunity lies in sustainability - both in the sustainability of cleaning itself and also the ability of cleaning to enhance the sustainability of other activities.

The cleaning industry has a major role to play in promoting client sustainability, and this is a key opportunity for cleaning businesses to promote themselves as being important to their clients' own operations.

Let’s take a couple of examples. If an office wishes to increase the rate at which it recycles products like paper, plastics and metals, the cleaning contractor is in prime position to assist in sorting products into separate waste streams so that they can be collected for recycling. This might be achieved through the simple provision of separate bins for different materials.

A second example might be a company that wanted to reduce its energy usage. Introducing a daytime cleaning regime in place of night cleaning would enable the client to significantly reduce its power requirements at night time and thereby reduce its energy consumption.

Daytime cleaning is in many ways a conversion of current cleaning operations to a more sustainable footing. Not only does it have environmental benefits, but it is also more socially sustainable in that it enables people to work day shifts and also to earn more as they provide more services to building occupants and often work longer hours as a result.

The concept of daytime cleaning has been around for many years; it is normal practice in countries such as Sweden. Here in the UK, in many ways it has been a solution in search of a problem, with cleaning businesses promoting it and clients asking why they should change. The emergence of sustainability as a key competitiveness issue in the 21st century gives a renewed purpose to daytime cleaning. It is an opportunity that all cleaning contractors should be taking to explain to their clients how daytime cleaning can help then achieve their own sustainability goals.

The CSSA has moved to prepare its members for the emergence of real sustainability in the cleaning sector by establishing a Sustainability Forum, bringing together representatives from the contract cleaning, equipment manufacturing and chemicals sides of the industry. The aim of that group is to develop the industry’s response to the sustainability challenge, including such areas as carbon footprint standards and ethical standards in the sector.   

Outsourcing issues

In the recession, one market for cleaning seems set to grow; and that is the market for public sector work. The government has made it clear through the recent De Anne Julius report and a variety of Ministerial speeches that they expect the private sector to play a greater role in the provision of public services.

For cleaning contractors, there are some very real opportunities to bid for public sector work and increase their reach that way. There are opportunities in the health service, government offices and other establishments and on the local authority side. For larger contracts, contractors should arrange to receive online notification from the Official Journal of the European Union (www.tendersdirect.co.uk). For smaller tenders, up to around £100,000 in value, contractors should take advantage of the CSSA being a registered interoperability partner with www.supply2.gov.uk and sign up to receive emails with smaller tender alerts.

New outsourcing is potentially a very lucrative area for the cleaning industry, but the issue of public sector pensions needs to be addressed before it can be comfortably looked upon as a safe marketplace. Public sector pensions are in many instances unfunded. They are paid for out of general taxation rather than there being a pot of money saved up to pay for them. This can become a significant issue in outsourcing, both in terms of the cost of providing a private pension equivalent to the public sector pension (35% of wages) and also in terms of the liability for historic pension entitlements that transfer over with the contract. In the worst case scenario these historic liabilities can concretise if a contract is lost and threaten the viability of the outsourced service provider. The moral is clear. Public sector contracts are potentially an excellent source of business, but beware of the possible pitfalls, especially pensions. It goes without saying that the CSSA, together with many other employer groups, is lobbying hard for the government to take responsibility for its own pension liabilities – and not just throw them over the side.    

Quality services

None of the opportunities for growth in the cleaning sector are going to be viable unless they are accompanied by an assurance that the contractor can provide a quality service. The ability of a cleaning business to differentiate itself as a quality service provider is vital in gaining the respect of the client base.

Many cleaning businesses have ISO 9001 already, and some have also moved on to ISO 14001 which covers the management of their environmental impacts. The CSSA, together with White Young Green Environmental, already offers an environmental management programme, which uses BS8555 and the ACORN programme as stepping stones to ISO14001. Over 20 CSSA members have gone through the process and their reaction has been extremely positive.

The cleaning industry recognises that clients are continually seeking innovation from their contractors and reliable performance in contracts. This is why the CSSA has also joined forces with the British Quality Foundation to promote its Levels of Excellence Programme within the cleaning sector. Levels of Excellence is a holistic programme that seeks to improve all aspects of business performance to the benefit of the client. A number of CSSA members have already embarked on the programme and they are seeing the benefits.

2009 will undoubtedly be a difficult year. For the cleaning industry, there will be price pressure and many contracts will be re-tendered. But for those businesses that can innovate, placing themselves in the minds of their clients and understanding what their priorities are, there are opportunities to be seized.


Andrew Large is Chief Executive of the Cleaning and Support Services Association.
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