Office cleaning in London, set up as a regular contract

A contract clean is a regular visit to your premises on agreed days, at an agreed time, against a written list of what gets cleaned and how often. Most of the work of setting one up happens before the first visit. You agree the specification, the visit times, and how the cleaners get in and out of a locked building. After that, you need a way to change the list when the office changes.

This page goes through each of those steps. If you're looking at a particular kind of premises, there are separate guides on office cleaning in Uxbridge, dental practice cleaning and yoga studio cleaning.

Looking at the space first

The quote form asks for the rooms, how often you want a visit, and your postcode, and that is often enough for a written price. Where the layout is unusual or the building has an access routine of its own, we can come and look before quoting. It's the easiest way to see the route from the entrance to the bin store, where the cleaning cupboard would go, and which rooms are off limits, none of which shows up in a floor area.

Agreeing the written specification

Regulation 9 of the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 requires every workplace, and the furniture and fittings in it, to be kept "sufficiently clean". The HSE's code of practice adds that how often a place is cleaned depends on the nature of the business. That leaves the detail to you, and the specification is where you write it down.

A useful specification is a table. Each row is a room or area, then the tasks in it, then how often each task is done: every visit, weekly, monthly. A kitchen used all day will have more rows than a meeting room booked twice a week. It's also where you record the decisions that are easy to forget:

• who supplies soap, paper towels, toilet rolls and bin liners
• rooms the cleaners should not enter, such as a server room or a locked records store
• anything left on desks that should be left alone
• products you want used, or avoided because someone in the office reacts to them

Keep one copy each. A cleaner covering a visit reads the same page as the regular team, and it's the document you'd show if anyone asked how the premises are kept clean. The Uxbridge office cleaning guide goes further into what the regulation and the code of practice say, if you want the legal detail.

Choosing when the visits happen

Visits can be booked between 6am and 10pm, seven days a week. An evening visit suits an office that empties at a predictable time, while an early start works better where people stay late or you want the kitchen and washrooms fresh for the morning. A weekend visit can take the tasks that need empty rooms, such as moving chairs to vacuum under desks.

The right slot depends on your building as much as your staff. Some buildings lock their front doors at a set hour or switch the lifts to fob-only. Others have a security desk that needs notice of contractors. Tell us those rules at the start, and the agreed visit time goes into the specification.

Keys, alarms and access

Out-of-hours cleaning means someone outside your organisation holding a way into your premises, so it's worth agreeing the details in writing:

• how many keys or fobs are issued, who issues them and who signs for them
• whether the cleaners get their own alarm code, so their entries can be told apart from your staff's, and what to do if the alarm is triggered
• who to call if a door won't lock, a window has been left open, or something looks wrong on arrival
• how the premises are left: lights off, windows shut, blinds down, alarm set
• when keys come back, for example when a cleaner leaves or the contract ends

If your building has a managing agent, they may have their own contractor rules or sign-in book. Ask for them early, because they can decide which visit times are possible at all.

When the specification needs to change

When a team moves onto another floor or a meeting room is turned into storage, the specification should change with it, and that works best in writing. Send the change, ask for an updated specification back with a revised quote if the price moves, and agree it before it starts on site. The next cleaner through the door won't have heard a spoken request.

It's also worth reading the specification again every so often, even if nothing has obviously changed. A task set weekly when the office opened may now need doing on every visit, or the other way round.

The kind of premises we clean

Our commercial clients include a dental practice in Uxbridge and a yoga studio. Both show why the specification matters: a dental practice's cleaning schedule is part of what its inspectors look at, and a studio floor has its own rules about water and products. The dental practice and yoga studio guides cover those in detail.

Crystal Clear Cleans works across the London Boroughs of Hillingdon, Ealing and Hounslow (areas we cover). The same cleaners go back to the same premises wherever we can, so the people holding your keys already know the building.

Clinical and healthcare premises

A dental practice, a GP surgery or a clinic is a workplace like any other for most of its floor area, and then it isn't. Two things change.

The first is that the frequencies are set for you. Health Technical Memorandum 01-05 puts the patient treatment area on a clean after every session, floors and exposed surfaces on a daily interval including floors well away from the chair, and blinds, ventilation fittings, shelving and radiators on a weekly one. A specification for a clinical building starts from those intervals rather than from what suits the visit pattern.

The second is that the paperwork is part of the job. The CQC's dental guidance asks a cleaning contractor to hold a schedule of general cleaning with the frequency of specific areas, fixtures and fittings written into it, including high frequency touch items such as keyboards, telephones, door handles and light switches. The duty to be clean sits on the practice under regulation 15 of the 2014 Regulations, which is exactly why the contractor's document matters: a thin cleaning arrangement becomes the practice's finding, even though a contractor did the work.

What we clean in a clinical building is the environment: treatment room surfaces and floors, the decontamination room's floors and general surfaces, reception, waiting area, WCs, staff room and corridors, and the touch points the CQC names. What stays with the practice is anything that is part of the decontamination process itself. Instrument processing, the ultrasonic bath, the washer-disinfector and the autoclave are not a cleaning contract's work, and nor is handling or moving clinical waste or sharps beyond the practice's own procedure.

Our dental practice cleaning guide sets out the standards in full, with the frequency table and a list of what to ask any contractor before you sign. For a price, tell us how many surgeries or consulting rooms there are, your session pattern, whether there is a decontamination room, and how the building is accessed outside opening hours.

Getting a quote

Get a free quote by telling us the rooms, how often you'd like a visit, the times that suit, and your postcode. Mention how the building is accessed out of hours, even if it isn't settled yet. You'll get a written price back, and we can arrange to see the space first if it helps.