The call comes on a Monday, usually before nine. The office manager has walked in, found the kitchen in the state the Friday leavers left it, and wants to know why it was not cleaned. I ask what the specification says about the kitchen. There is a pause, some scrolling, and then she reads it out to me: kitchen areas to be cleaned as required.
That phrase has cost more money and more goodwill than any other three words in this industry. It commits nobody to anything. It cannot be enforced, cannot be priced straight, and cannot be argued about productively, because both parties can read it in their favour and both are right.
A cleaning specification is a document that tells a contractor what to do and tells a client what they have bought. Most of the ones I am sent do neither.
What is a specification for?
It is the contract’s operational half. The service agreement covers term, price, notice and liability. The specification covers the work, and it is the only part of the paperwork that describes what happens in your building on a Tuesday night.
That makes it your single point of control. Complaints, credits, audits, renewals and disputes all resolve back to the specification, because there is nothing else to resolve back to. A client who has not read theirs is negotiating from memory against a contractor who has read it very carefully.
It also sets the price. Every bidder builds a labour schedule from the specification, so the document determines what you pay before anyone quotes. A tender pack with a good specification and a mediocre service agreement will get you a better contract than the reverse, and legal review time tends to go entirely the other way.
Vague is cheap
Here is the mechanism, and it is the reason this matters more than the tidy-document argument.
A tender goes out with a loose specification. Six contractors price it. Five read it conservatively, allow for the kitchen being cleaned properly every night, and come in at a realistic number. One reads it thinly, allows two and a half hours where the others allowed three and a half, and comes in twenty per cent under.
The thin bidder wins, because on paper all six offered the same service. Vague is cheap, and vagueness in a specification is not a drafting weakness so much as an invitation. The client did not choose a worse service. They wrote a document that could not tell the difference.
Which phrases should never appear in one?
Strike these on sight. As required. As necessary. Regularly. Periodically. To an acceptable standard. When needed. Spot clean as appropriate.
Each of them moves a decision from the document into somebody’s head, and the head it moves into belongs to whoever is under the most pressure at the time. On a well-run site that is a supervisor doing their best. On a badly run one it is a cleaner with forty minutes left and three floors to go.
Replace each with a frequency and a scope. Not “washrooms cleaned regularly” but “all washrooms cleaned and restocked once per shift, five shifts per week, with a second check of ground floor washrooms at 13:00 on weekdays”. Long, dull, and worth every word of it. The test for any line is whether two people reading it on a bad Friday would carry out the same work.
Why contractors like a vague specification
I will admit something about my own side of this. When a loose specification lands on my desk, part of me is pleased.
A vague document gives a contractor room. Room to flex hours when somebody is off sick, room to decide that the boardroom does not need doing on a quiet week, room to argue after the fact that what happened was within scope. It also lets a contractor price to win rather than price to deliver, which is a temptation the whole trade lives with.
Firms that intend to do the job properly would rather have a tight specification, because it protects them from the bidder who does not. I have lost tenders to companies whose price only worked because the document let it. A tight specification is the client protecting themselves and, incidentally, protecting the honest bidder.
What belongs in the daily schedule?
Structure it by area rather than by task, because that is how a building is used and how a cleaner moves through it.
Break the site into zones with different requirements: reception and front of house, open-plan office, cellular offices and meeting rooms, washrooms, tea points and kitchens, circulation and stairs, lifts, stores and back of house. Each zone gets its own task list with a frequency against every line, using a plain notation: daily, three times weekly, weekly, monthly, quarterly, six-monthly, annually.
Then say what “clean” means for the items where it is contestable. Desks, for instance. Is the cleaner clearing paper to wipe underneath, or wiping around what is left out? Both are defensible; only one is what you think you are buying. Same with keyboards, screens and telephones, which carry a damage liability that makes many contractors avoid them unless instructed.
List the exclusions explicitly. Consumables. Windows above ground floor level. External areas. Specialist floor treatments. Interiors of fridges, microwaves and dishwashers. Plant rooms and comms rooms. An exclusion in writing prevents an argument; an exclusion assumed guarantees one.
State the hours, not just the tasks
The task list tells you what. The resource line tells you whether it can be done.
Your specification should state the number of operatives on site, the shift start and finish times, the total hours per week, the supervisor’s presence and visit frequency, and the arrangements for absence cover. Without those numbers you cannot compare two bids at all, because the labour schedule is where nearly all of the cost sits.
A client who knows their building has three and a half hours of work in it, and reads a bid offering two and a half, has learned everything they need to know about that bid without opening the pricing page. Vague is cheap, and the hours line is where vagueness gets expensive.
How should periodics be written?
With months against them.
Carpet extraction, hard floor stripping and resealing, high-level work, washroom deep cleans, kitchen deep cleans, upholstery, light fittings, internal glass at height: these are the jobs that keep a building from ageing badly, and they are the first things to fall out of a contract because nothing forces them to happen on a given date.
“Annually” is not a date. “Carpet extraction to all open-plan areas in the week commencing the second Monday in February” is. Name the month for every periodic, say who books it, say whether it sits inside the monthly charge or gets quoted separately, and put the whole schedule on one page that both parties look at each quarter.
The annual that never happens
Watch how it goes wrong, because the pattern is identical everywhere.
Year one, the periodic schedule is fresh and somebody chases it. Year two, the carpet clean is postponed because a project is running on that floor, and it does not get rebooked. Year three, nobody remembers it was in the contract. Year five, the carpet needs replacing at a cost twenty times the extraction that was skipped, and the tenant is arguing about whether that counts as fair wear at lease end.
The remedy is a named person on the client side who signs off each periodic as completed, and a line on the monthly report showing what is due next quarter. It takes four minutes a month.
How do you check any of it is happening?
Audit, jointly, against the document you wrote.
A workable audit is a scored walk of sampled areas, using the same zones as the specification, with defects categorised by severity rather than counted flat. Once a month, contractor and client together, an hour with a clipboard. Score it, agree the actions, date them, review them next time.
What I would avoid is an elaborate penalty regime with points and credits. Those exist mostly to give procurement something to put in a report, and their practical effect is to make a contractor manage the scoring rather than the building. I would rather a client walked the site with me monthly and told me plainly what was wrong. That is a less comfortable arrangement for me than a spreadsheet, and it produces a cleaner building.
Colour coding, chemical dilution control and method statements belong in here too, referenced to a recognised standard rather than described from scratch. Naming the standard is enough. A specification that reproduces half a training manual is one nobody will open twice.
What we rewrote off Mollison Avenue
A two-building site off Mollison Avenue in Enfield, EN3, came to us last year with a specification running to thirty-one pages, most of it inherited from a facilities template and some of it describing rooms the client no longer occupied. The phrase “as required” appeared nine times. There was no resource line anywhere in it.
We rewrote it to eleven pages. Six zones, a frequency against every task, an exclusions list, the hours and shift pattern stated on the first page, and a periodic schedule with twelve named months across two years. The client cut the meeting rooms from daily to three times weekly, because they were used twice a week, and put the saved hours into the washrooms and the two kitchens, which had been short for years without anyone being able to point at a document and prove it.
The monthly charge went up by about four per cent, which the client agreed to before they had seen the new document, on the strength of the hours line alone.
