Every tender document I read promises the client a fresh start, and every one of them is written by someone who knows perfectly well that the same six people will be mopping the same floor on the Monday after the changeover. That gap between what the market sells and what the law delivers is the single most expensive misunderstanding in commercial cleaning procurement, and clients walk into it two or three times a decade.
TUPE is usually explained as employment protection, which it is. It is also, from where a building manager sits, a set of commercial facts about what you are buying, what you cannot buy, and what your outgoing supplier can do to you on the way out.
Does TUPE apply when you change cleaning contractor?
Almost always, and the mechanism is worth knowing by name. The Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 2006 cover business transfers and, separately, service provision changes. A service provision change is what happens when a contract for a service moves from one provider to another, or comes back in house, or goes out for the first time.
Cleaning is the textbook case. There is an organised grouping of employees whose principal purpose is serving that client at that building, the activities carried out after the changeover are fundamentally the same activities, and so the staff assigned to the site transfer automatically to the incoming contractor on their existing terms, with their continuous service intact.
You cannot contract out of it. A clause in your tender inviting bidders to supply their own team does not disapply the regulations, and a bidder who cheerfully agrees to that clause is either inexperienced or planning something you would rather not be party to.
What the client signs up to without signing anything
The client is not the employer and does not transfer anybody. What the client does is trigger the whole thing by awarding a contract, and then live with the consequences in three places.
Price, because the incoming bidder has to fund whatever terms arrive. Continuity, because your building keeps the team it had rather than getting a new one. And risk, because a botched transfer generates tribunal claims, and the parties to those claims will be reaching for whatever the tender documents and the service agreement said about co-operation and indemnities.
The people do not change. Hold that thought through everything below.
What arrives with the transfer, and what does it cost you?
Contracts of employment transfer as they stand. Hourly rates, contracted hours, shift patterns, notice periods, accrued holiday, continuous service dating back to whenever that cleaner first started on your site under whichever contractor. Liabilities transfer too, including outstanding grievances, disciplinary processes and live tribunal claims connected with the employment.
The incoming contractor cannot tidy this up. Changing terms to the employee’s detriment because of the transfer is void, and levelling everyone down onto a house contract is precisely the thing the regulations prevent. So a bidder inheriting a cleaner on an above-market rate with twelve years’ service and an enhanced sick pay arrangement has to carry it, and it goes into their price.
Two consequences for the client. Your new contract will not be cheaper than the arithmetic of the transferring payroll allows, whatever anybody’s sales director says. And if your outgoing contractor has been generous, or careless, that generosity is now yours to fund.
The list, and why it grows
Outgoing contractors are required to provide employee liability information to the incoming one no later than 28 days before the transfer. Names, ages, terms, disciplinary and grievance history over the past two years, claims, collective agreements.
Watch that list. In a market this competitive, a contractor who has just lost your site has a modest interest in making the site expensive for whoever won it, and lists have a habit of arriving longer than expected. The area supervisor who visited fortnightly appears as assigned to the building. Somebody on long-term sick materialises. A mobile operative who covered your washrooms on Thursdays turns out to have been dedicated to you all along.
Some of those additions are legitimate and some are chancing it, and the test is whether the person was in fact assigned to the organised grouping serving your site. Get the list early, question it in writing, and make sure your current contract obliges the incumbent to provide accurate information within a stated period. That clause costs nothing to insert when you sign and is worth a great deal when you leave.
What should the client do before the tender goes out?
Sort three things before a single bid document leaves the building.
Establish the true staffing picture. Headcount, contracted hours per person, hourly rates, shift patterns, length of service, and any enhancements. Bidders cannot price your site properly without it, and a tender issued without it produces quotes that all get revised upwards after award, which wastes everyone’s spring.
Decide your wage position and say so. If you want the London Living Wage on your site, put it in the specification rather than hoping. The rate rose to £14.80 an hour for 2025-26 and accredited employers had until the first of this month to have it in place across their workforces, contracted staff included. A client who mandates it gets it priced properly. A client who mentions it in the interview and leaves it out of the specification gets the version somebody hopes they will not check.
And leave time. Which brings me to the mistake I see most.
Six weeks between award and start
The transfer needs a measures letter, a consultation with the affected staff or their representatives, employee liability information at least 28 days out, and enough breathing room for the incoming contractor to meet the team, sort payroll details, arrange vetting and order kit.
Clients routinely award a cleaning contract three weeks before they want it live, because procurement ran late and the start date was fixed in January. Failure to inform and consult carries a protective award of up to thirteen weeks’ pay per affected employee, and while that liability sits with the contractors rather than with you, the disruption lands squarely on your floor.
Six weeks between award and mobilisation is comfortable. Four is workable. Anything under three is a decision to have a bad handover.
Why does the new contractor’s first month go badly?
Because the team arriving on day one has just watched their employer lose the contract, and every one of them assumes they are next.
That is not paranoia. Incoming contractors do sometimes trim hours in the first fortnight, quietly, hoping nobody counts, and the trade knows it. So your cleaners turn up on the Monday demoralised and job-hunting, and the ones with options start leaving in week three. The people do not change, but the ones who leave take the building knowledge with them, and that is where the standard wobbles. A handover that loses three of seven cleaners in a month has cost you more than the tender saved.
There is a second reason, less discussed. The new contractor has inherited a rota built by somebody else for a specification that has probably drifted from what the building now needs. Working out what is going on takes a month of visits, and during that month things get missed.
The induction that gets skipped
The single best predictor of a smooth handover is whether the incoming contractor spends real time with the transferring team before day one rather than after it.
Not a letter. A supervisor in the building, walking the floors with the people who have cleaned them for years, asking what the specification gets wrong. Guaranteeing hours in writing in the first week rather than leaving people to wonder. Getting names right.
It costs a few hundred pounds of supervisor time and it is the difference between keeping five of six and keeping two. I have never regretted spending it and I have twice regretted rushing it.
Should you change contractor at all?
Here is the part that argues against my own tender pipeline.
Most of the sites I am invited to bid for do not have a contractor problem. They have a specification problem, or a price problem, or a communication problem, and all three are cheaper to fix with the incumbent than by running a procurement exercise and a transfer. If the cleaning has slipped because the hours were cut two renewals ago, changing supplier changes nothing at all, because the same hours and the same people arrive under a different logo. You will have spent three months and a great deal of goodwill to buy yourself the situation you already had.
Change contractor when the problems are managerial rather than structural: no supervision, no cover, no response to complaints, invoices that never match the specification. Those do improve with a new firm. A shortfall in hours does not, unless you also fund the hours.
The government launched a call for evidence on reforming these regulations in April, closing in July, so some of the detail above may move over the next couple of years. The underlying arithmetic will not.
What we did off Fenchurch Street
We took over a mixed-tenant block off Fenchurch Street, EC3M, last year, inheriting seven cleaners and a specification nobody had reviewed since 2019. The list we were given had nine names on it. Two of them, a mobile supervisor and a window operative, were not assigned to the site in any meaningful sense, and we said so in writing before the transfer rather than after.
The people do not change, so we spent the money on the handover instead of the mobilisation paperwork. The seven who did transfer got their hours confirmed in the first week and a supervisor who walked the building with them before day one. Six are still there. The specification we inherited turned out to have two of the eight floors being cleaned nightly that were empty, and one that was cleaned twice a week and shouldn’t have been.
We moved the hours across rather than handing them back. The client’s invoice stayed the same, which is not a story anybody puts in a tender document.
