Imagine this situation
You win a cleaning contract, recruit the cleaners, complete the onboarding, train them, provide equipment, manage absences and spend months getting the service running properly. The customer gets to know the cleaners, likes them and eventually asks a simple question: why don’t we just employ them ourselves?
If you have been in business for long enough, you may have experienced this first hand or observed it closely. For a small cleaning business, this can feel like the customer is taking the very people you worked hard to recruit and develop. The immediate question is usually, can my customer simply take my cleaners? But there is another question cleaning businesses should perhaps be asking: if the customer employed the cleaners directly tomorrow, what would they still need my business for?
Recently, the UK Government is now asking a similar question about outsourced public services. This might trickle down to other small to midsize contract agreements in time.
First of all, what if a customer wants to employ your cleaners directly?
Cleaning businesses should think about this possibility before it happens, particularly when negotiating larger or longer-term contracts.
A properly drafted service agreement can set out what happens if a customer recruits employees or workers introduced through your business. Depending on the circumstances, this might include reasonable non-solicitation provisions, recruitment or transfer arrangements, termination provisions and protection of confidential business information. These provisions need to be properly drafted and legally appropriate rather than simply copied into a contract, particularly because restrictions cannot automatically prevent an individual from choosing where they work.
Cleaning businesses also need to understand TUPE. When a cleaning contract changes hands, ends or is brought in-house, the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations may apply depending on the circumstances. This can mean employees assigned to the service transfer with it rather than simply being “poached”. We will advise your cleaning business to put in place the appropriate action plan for when a contract is being transferred or brought in house rather than assuming that ownership of the customer relationship means ownership of the workforce.
But contracts and legal protections only take us so far, what other moat should you build around your cleaning service?
Make the business harder to replace than the cleaner
Suppose a customer believes they are paying your company simply to provide two cleaners for twenty hours each week. Eventually, someone may look at the numbers and ask whether it would be cheaper to employ those cleaners directly.
Now imagine that the same cleaning company provides recruitment, absence cover, training, supervision, equipment and chemicals, health and safety support, inspections, specialist cleaning, quality assurance, performance reporting and continuous improvement.
Employing the two cleaners directly no longer recreates the entire service.
This is an important distinction for smaller cleaning businesses. Protecting your customer base should not depend entirely on preventing customers from recruiting your employees. The stronger defence is building enough capability around the cleaning that removing the cleaning company would also mean losing something valuable.
The Government is questioning outsourcing by default
In June, the Government announced a new approach intended to move central government away from what it described as “outsourcing by default.”
Under Procurement Policy Note 024, central government departments, executive agencies and non-departmental public bodies will have to consider whether certain services could be better delivered internally before proceeding with procurement. From 1 April 2027, a Public Interest Test will apply to qualifying planned service projects and re-procurements valued above £1 million including VAT, subject to exemptions.
This does not mean that government outsourcing is ending. The test is intended to examine services individually and consider factors beyond the immediate contract price, including long-term value for money, service quality, resilience and wider economic and social outcomes. Even where insourcing initially appears attractive, further analysis can still conclude that outsourcing represents the better delivery model.
But cleaning has specifically been placed within the discussion. The Government has said that, subject to the Public Interest Test, the Cabinet Office will look at bringing building-management services including cleaning and security back in-house as existing contracts expire from 2028. The initial consideration covers 83 government buildings.
For cleaning contractors, that is worth paying attention to. Aside from large contractors looking to attract small scale contracts, HR departments within small to mediums organisations might be commenting the same – why shouldn’t they employ their own comment too!
Insourcing doesn’t necessarily remove the need for cleaning businesses
There is a temptation to see insourcing as the customer “taking away your bread and butter”, It isn’t quite that simple.
Employing cleaners is one part of running a cleaning operation. Someone still has to recruit people, train them, arrange cover, supervise standards, procure equipment and chemicals, manage specialist work, maintain compliance, inspect performance and continually improve the service.
This creates an interesting opportunity.
A cleaning company may traditionally have bundled all of these capabilities into one price for providing the entire cleaning service. In the future, some customers may want to purchase individual capabilities while employing their core cleaning workforce themselves.
A business that previously sold a £100,000 cleaning contract might therefore need to ask whether it could separately sell specialist cleaning, recruitment and temporary cover, training, independent auditing, mobilisation support, hygiene verification, equipment management or performance monitoring.
This is particularly relevant to SMEs. A regional cleaning business does not need to become a huge facilities management company to do this. It may simply need to identify the two or three things it does exceptionally well and turn those capabilities into services customers can buy independently.
If your customers go “in-house” tomorrow, what would they still buy from you?
This may be one of the most useful strategic exercises a cleaning business can undertake.
Write down everything your company currently provides beyond the physical cleaning itself.
Perhaps you are particularly good at finding reliable cleaners quickly. That capability could become recruitment or temporary workforce support.
Maybe your supervisors are excellent at turning around poorly performing sites. That knowledge could become auditing, mobilisation or improvement support.
Perhaps you understand infection control, specialist floor care, industrial environments or complex machinery better than the customer ever could internally.
Those capabilities have value regardless of who employs the person holding the mop.
I have been asking similar questions within my own cleaning business. Moving beyond simply providing cleaning and developing recruitment and workforce solutions is one example of recognising that the customer’s need is much broader than the cleaning hours we traditionally sell.
The objective isn’t to abandon cleaning. It is to understand where the real value within a cleaning business sits.
CleanBow Perspective
The Government’s new approach should not be interpreted as announcing the death of outsourced cleaning. Its own guidance explicitly allows for different sourcing outcomes and even recognises that some services may ultimately work through a mixed model, with certain elements delivered internally and others externally.
However, it should make cleaning businesses think.
If the only thing separating your company from the customer employing cleaners directly is the employment contract, your position may become increasingly vulnerable.
If your business provides knowledge, recruitment capability, specialist expertise, quality assurance, technology, training, resilience and measurable improvements, the conversation becomes very different.
Businesses that sell labour compete heavily on price. Businesses that build capability around labour have more ways to compete on value.
So perhaps the question isn’t simply how cleaning businesses can prevent customers from taking cleaning in-house.
The more important question is: If your customer employed the cleaners themselves tomorrow, what would they still need your business for? That answer may tell you what your cleaning business should build next.
