Good procurement rewards value. Poor procurement rewards low prices. The problem isn’t the framework. It’s how organisations choose to use it.
If you are familiar with the cleaning sector, you will have seen this story plays out and it it the case across the cleaning industry every week.
A contractor spends years looking after a building. The relationship with the client is strong, the cleaners know the site inside out, complaints are rare and the contract runs smoothly. Then the agreement comes to an end and the work is put out to tender. Several companies submit bids, one quotation comes in a little lower than the rest and before long a new contractor arrives wearing a different uniform but carrying the same mop and bucket.
For the outgoing contractor, the question is usually the same. “What more could we have done?”. It is a question that should be answered better than simply saying, “You were too expensive, or the management decided to change a few things”.
Price has always been an important part of buying any service, and rightly so. Every organisation has a responsibility to manage its budgets carefully and demonstrate value for money. However, when cleaning becomes nothing more than a race to offer the lowest hourly rate, everyone eventually pays the price, including the client.
Cleaning is still seen as a cost rather than an investment – for most corporate clients.
One of the biggest challenges facing the cleaning industry is not the quality of its people or the professionalism of its businesses. It is the perception of the service itself.
Cleaning often sits quietly in the background. When it is done well, few people notice. Floors remain clean, washrooms stay stocked, bins are emptied, infection risks are reduced and buildings continue operating as expected. It is only when standards begin to slip that attention suddenly turns to the cleaning contractor.
Because of this, many organisations continue to view cleaning primarily as an overhead rather than an investment. Budgets are reviewed, savings are sought and cleaning frequently becomes one of the first areas where costs are challenged. The irony is that the value created by good cleaning extends far beyond appearance. It supports healthier workplaces, protects expensive assets, contributes to staff wellbeing, improves first impressions and, in sectors such as healthcare and food production, plays an essential role in protecting public health.
When these wider benefits are overlooked, the conversation quickly becomes focused on price rather than outcomes.
Good procurement is about value added to the client’s organisation not simply cost
Perhaps, it would be easy to blame procurement teams for driving prices down, but that would be unfair in most cases.
While the Procurement Act 2023 places considerable emphasis on securing value for money over the whole life of a contract rather than simply accepting the cheapest bid. Government guidance encourages contracting authorities to consider quality, efficiency and long term outcomes when assessing tenders.
We know that not all commercial office managers look at the procurement in principle however, recent public sector cleaning tenders reflect this approach. One major housing provider awarded 55% of its evaluation to quality, 40% to price and 5% to social value, while another national framework allocated 60% to quality, 30% to price and 10% to social value.
Those figures tell an important story.
The cheapest quotation is not supposed to win automatically. The problem is that not every procurement exercise is carried out with the same mindset. Some organisations continue to focus heavily on immediate savings, while others recognise that cleaning is a long term partnership where reliability, workforce stability and consistent standards are every bit as important as the hourly rate.
The difference between those two approaches can determine whether a contract succeeds or struggles.
The hidden cost of buying cheap
When a cleaning contract is awarded at a price that leaves very little room for investment, the effects rarely become obvious on day one.
The cleaners still arrive.
The uniforms still look new.
The equipment still works.
The real impact emerges gradually.
Margins become tighter, supervisors oversee more sites than they should, training is reduced, equipment replacement is delayed and staff shortages become increasingly difficult to cover. Eventually service quality begins to drift, not because people stop caring, but because the business no longer has enough resources to consistently deliver the standard it originally promised.
For smaller cleaning businesses, this pressure can be particularly severe. Industry guidance suggests that sustainable profit margins for many commercial cleaning contracts often sit between 5% and 10%, leaving very little room for unexpected cost increases or operational disruption.
That means even a seemingly small reduction in contract price can remove a significant proportion of the contractor’s profit, making it much harder to invest in people, equipment and innovation.
Importantantly, Changing contractors is rarely as cheap as it appears
One of the biggest costs in any cleaning contract is rarely shown on the tender evaluation.
Changing providers requires mobilisation, site surveys, security vetting, induction training, transfer of information, staff communication, equipment deployment and ongoing management during the transition period. Even where TUPE protects employees, there is still considerable work involved in establishing new systems and rebuilding working relationships.
Experienced cleaners often carry valuable knowledge that cannot easily be written into a handover document. They know which areas require extra attention, how a building operates throughout the day and the expectations of individual customers. Losing that experience can affect service quality long before it appears on a performance report.
This is why organisations should think carefully before changing providers simply to achieve a modest reduction in annual cost. The savings shown on paper may not represent the true cost of disruption.
The best cleaning companies compete differently
Many serious cleaning businesses are beginning to move away from competing solely on hourly rates, they are starting to compete on evidence.
They demonstrate robust recruitment processes, invest in training, provide digital reporting, measure quality, embrace sustainability and build long term relationships with their customers. Increasingly, those are the qualities buyers are looking for, particularly in healthcare, education and public sector environments where accountability matters as much as cost.
It is becoming common for public procurement guidance written specifically to help cleaning businesses win public sector work advises against purely competing on underpricing bids. The case that buyers increasingly recognise unrealistically low bids as a potential risk to service delivery and that quality responses often outperform the cheapest quotation.
Put it simple, even public procurement officers now want to make sure a cleaning contract will deliver consistently, just necessarily cheaper.
Maybe a better question to ask is
Not “Who is the cheapest? But “Who is most likely to deliver consistently excellent cleaning over the next five years?“
Those two questions may produce very different answers.
Price will always matter, and it should. Every organisation has a responsibility to spend public and private money wisely. However, good value is not achieved by buying the cheapest service. It is achieved by selecting the provider capable of delivering the greatest long term benefit, protecting the people who use the building and maintaining standards that reflect the organisation’s reputation.
For the cleaning industry, that distinction could make all the difference.
Up next
Of course, even the best contract and the fairest price mean very little without the people delivering the service. Across the UK, cleaning businesses consistently identify one challenge above almost every other, finding and keeping reliable cleaners. In our next Inside the Industry article, we’ll explore why recruitment and retention have become one of the biggest threats to sustainable growth, and what employers can do to build a workforce that wants to stay.
