Time for the Government to listen to our industry
British Cleaning Council Chairman, Jim Melvin, says the Government has been ignoring our industry’s concerns for long enough.
As numbers of people being infected with COVID-19 soared at the beginning of the year, the level of concern and frustration felt by many in our industry also rose.
Everyone at the British Cleaning Council (BCC) is frankly becoming increasingly frustrated that the Government doesn’t truly listen to our industry. It was exactly two
years ago this month that we told how very worried and concerned we were about the potentially huge negative impact on the cleaning and hygiene industry of Government proposals for the immigration system.
The industry has always relied on workers of all nationalities and UK nationals are historically harder to recruit, so it was obvious that plans to bracket sector workers in the low skilled category for which visas would be restricted would cause serious labour shortages in the cleaning sector.
As anyone who works in the industry knows, that was both abhorrent and incorrect, as cleaning sector personnel are skilled in their own right. The last two years have proven that unequivocally.
Typically and sadly, the Government didn’t listen to our concerns, and the immigration rules brought in early last year have combined with Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic to create the severe shortages the industry is now suffering from. We’ve spent the past few months trying to alert the Government from a partnership perspective about the issue and asking for assistance.
It’s surely not too difficult to understand that such major recruitment problems, coming at a time when a new variant has sent COVID infection rates soaring, and in the middle of winter, could lead to buildings not being cleaned hygienically and potentially put the health of people at risk.
Industry staff are the first line of defence in keeping people safe and healthy and we fear that this role could be impaired because we don’t have enough staff to do the job, thus slowing the recovery from the pandemic.
Once again, the Government is not listening to our genuine fears. It dismisses our industry as employing an unskilled workforce of cheap labour from abroad, and says that
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changing the immigration policy wouldn’t be politically expedient. This couldn’t be further from the truth, and shows either a lack of knowledge or a failure to grasp reality.
Industry employers pay at least the National Minimum Wage, with many paying more. The rate has been set by the Government so how can it be classified as cheap labour? Additionally, more and more employers are Real Living Wage employers, a fact which also seems to have passed the Government by.
It’s infuriating that the Government is playing politics with these important issues instead of doing what our industry and the country needs by recognising the sector’s vital role in protecting people’s health, along with our important role protecting the environment.
One area where we have made more progress is in our drive to introduce a universal training and apprenticeships programme for the sector, which the Trailblazer group has now been given the go-ahead to develop our proposals. Yet even there, it is the industry’s third attempt at setting up such an apprenticeship.
Through initiatives such as the Chartered Practitioners register, recently launched by the Worshipful Company of Environmental Cleaners (WCEC), the Cleaning and Support Services Association’s (CSSA) Clean Start campaign and the Trailblazer’s apprenticeships bid, we‘re striving to create a formal career development ladder, which will support staff to progress throughout their working life, helping make the sector more attractive to new entrants.
Our industry is changing and modernising. Now we need the Government to update its ideas about our sector as well.
As part of a collective process, we are working with member associations and companies to discuss the next steps. We intend to redouble our efforts to lobby Government and make it very clear that we fully intend to be heard.
www.britishcleaningcouncil.org twitter.com/TomoCleaning
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