Protecting growth
British Cleaning Council (BCC) Chairman, Paul Thrupp, says post-Brexit immigration plans risk damaging the cleaning sector.
New research that we at the BCC released recently has some very interesting facts and figures about the cleaning sector.
We have released a major research report on the sector annually for the past five years. As the voice of the cleaning sector, we want to show how important the industry is by demonstrating is huge size and scale.
This year’s report revealed that there are approximately 1.63m workers in the industry, making up around 5% of the UK workforce.
This total, calculated for the first time by including cleaning workers employed by businesses and organisations in non-core cleaning industries such as cabin crew who clean planes at turnaround and shopworkers who clean the store, gives a true picture of the size and scale of our sector.
The figures put cleaning on a par with the transport and storage sector, making it one of the top 10 largest UK industries for employment.
Our report, which classifies cleaning into four core types – cleaning activities, facilities management, landscape service activities, and waste and resource management – shows that, overall, employment in the industry has increased 5% between 2015 and 2018 – greater than the whole economy, which recorded a 3% growth in that period.
Cleaning provides a vital service for the nation, ensuring that our workplaces, hospitals, schools, transport and public spaces are clean and pleasant to use. Hotel surveys consistently place a venue's cleanliness as one of the top customer choice factors.
The sector has long believed the overall employment figure for the cleaning industry was very much understated by the official statistics for core cleaning activities, so this report is a valuable contribution to the national conversation about the financial, environmental and social value of cleaning to the nation.
But another set of figures in the report point to a major threat to the health of the cleaning sector.
The Labour Force Survey for April-June 2019 showed that in London, 62% of the cleaning industry workforce were born overseas, whilst the average figure for foreign-born workers in the industry as a whole is around 23%.
The figures also show that 45% of cleaning and housekeeping managers and supervisors were born overseas, and this role is hugely important to making sure that buildings, hotels and guest houses are kept clean and tidy. This means that proposals not to offer unskilled migrants working visits from next year could cause severe shortages in the cleaning and tourism industries in and around London.
The Government’s new immigration rules, which could come into effect after 31 December, would cut off the supply of lower paid, lower skilled migrant workers that we depend on. It will be really difficult to replace all these workers from UK-based citizens, and the result will be that standards of cleanliness will plunge across London.
This could have a detrimental impact on the huge national effort for high hygiene standards needed in this day and age, and none more so than now in response to the current Coronavirus outbreak.
Grubbier hotels and hostels could, in turn, discourage tourists from visiting the UK.
We are very concerned. Over the coming months, we’ll be representing the voice of the industry to the Government and doing out utmost to make sure our strong sector is not undermined by these plans.
Cleaning contributed over £54.5bn to the economy in 2018, with overall turnover increasing by 28% since 2013, double the 14% overall turnover of the economy in the same period.
One of the industry’s growth areas is the rising demand for recycling – waste and resources management rose to nearly £14bn in 2018 and now accounts for over a quarter (26%) of the turnover of the cleaning industry.
38 | FEATURE
www.britishcleaningcouncil.org twitter.com/TomoCleaning
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