Six months into a contract, a facilities manager rings me. Not a client of mine – a friend in the trade, asking me to cast an eye over it – because the cleaners she’d inherited “weren’t doing the kitchen properly.” So I ask to see the contract. Two pages. The relevant clause reads, in full: “The Contractor shall keep the premises in a clean and tidy condition.”
That’s the whole scope. That’s everything.
There was no argument for her to win, because there was nothing on paper to argue about.
What actually goes wrong when the scope is vague?
Nearly every cleaning dispute I’ve watched unfold in a London office traces back to the same root. The client thought they were buying one thing. The contractor thought they were selling another. Nobody wrote down which, so both were free to be quietly, reasonably, completely wrong about each other. The client pictures the fridge emptied and wiped out every Friday and the glass partitions kept clear of finger marks. The contractor priced a bin-empty, a vacuum and a wipe-down of the desks, five nights a week, and not a thing beyond it. Both parties are behaving in good faith. Both are heading for a fall.
Vagueness always resolves in somebody’s favour, and it is almost never the client’s. When “clean and tidy” is the whole of the standard, the contractor is the one who gets to decide what clean and tidy means, and they will decide it at precisely the level they costed. Push them on it and they’ll point at the clause, fairly enough, and explain that what you’re describing is a variation they’d be glad to quote for. So now you pay twice. Once for the vague version you signed, and again for the version you had in your head all along.
That’s the row. Six months in, every single time.
The “as required” trap
The two most expensive words in a cleaning spec are “as required.”
They sound like coverage. They are the opposite of it. “High-level dusting as required” means the tops of the partitions get done when the contractor judges it required, which turns out to be roughly never, because the person judging is the person who’d have to pay someone to climb the steps. “Carpets cleaned periodically,” with no period actually named, is a task that lives permanently in next month. If a frequency isn’t a number – weekly, monthly, twice a year – then it isn’t a commitment. It’s a word standing where a commitment should be, keeping the space warm.
What should a proper scope of works actually spell out?
A scope worth the paper it’s printed on does three things without flinching: it names every task, ties each task to a specific area, and pins each one to a stated frequency. Miss any of the three and the gap becomes the thing you argue about eighteen months later.
Start with the frequency split, because it’s the backbone. Daily tasks are the ones people picture: bins out, desks wiped, kitchen worktops cleared and cleaned, hard floors mopped and carpets vacuumed, washrooms scrubbed and restocked, the glass entrance doors spot-cleaned of the day’s handprints. Weekly tasks are the ones that quietly slip: skirting boards, the full run of internal glass, telephone and desk sanitising, the fridge if you’re lucky enough to have it named. Then the periodic column, which is where the real money and the real trouble both live – high-level dusting, carpet extraction, internal window cleaning, hard-floor buffing, the deep kitchen clean.
Each task needs an area written against it. A proper spec carries a floor-by-floor, room-by-room breakdown: reception, the third-floor kitchenette, the two accessible WCs on each level, the client-facing meeting rooms that matter far more to the impression you make than the store cupboard nobody ever sees. “Clean the office” is not an instruction. “Vacuum and spot-clean the second-floor breakout area nightly, extract the carpet quarterly” is.
And each task needs a standard you can actually check it against. This is where a decent spec leans on something like the British Institute of Cleaning Science appearance standards rather than a pile of adjectives. “Sparkling” is not a measurement. “No visible debris, no streaking on glass, dispensers filled” is one. When the standard is checkable, the monthly walk-round takes twenty minutes and settles matters. When it’s a mood, the walk-round is just two people disagreeing about the word “clean” all over again.
The dull clauses matter as much as the glamorous ones, and they’re exactly the ones a thin contract skips. Access hours – is this a night clean wrapped up before the building opens, or the daytime presence that’s become normal since everyone drifted back to the office three days a week? Keys, alarm codes, the security escort for the comms room. Whether the two hours on site mean two cleaners for an hour or one cleaner stretched across a whole floor they can’t realistically cover. Put the hours in. Put the headcount in.
The periodic tasks are where the money hides
Everyone fixes on the nightly list, because that’s the visible part, the bit you can see wasn’t done. The disputes almost all live one column across.
Deep cleans, carpet extraction, high-level work, external glass – these are expensive and infrequent, and they’re the first things a keen quote goes silent about. A contractor bidding low knows exactly what they’ve left out. They’ve priced the nightly service to win the tender and left the periodic tasks either unmentioned or buried under “as required,” so that when the carpets in your Fitzrovia media office go grey and flat a year and a half in, the deep clean turns up as a fresh invoice rather than a thing you were sure you’d already bought. Name the intervals. Twice-yearly carpet extraction, quarterly high-level dusting, monthly hard-floor maintenance – whatever the site actually needs, but a number, on the page, agreed by both signatures.
So who’s buying the toilet roll?
Here’s the small clause that starts more rows than any other, pound for pound.
Consumables. The loo roll, the hand soap, the blue roll in the kitchen, the bin liners, the hand towels, the little plug-in air fresheners nobody will admit to caring about right up until they run out. Somebody supplies all of it and somebody pays for all of it, and in a vague contract that somebody stays gloriously undefined until the Monday morning the dispensers are empty and reception is fielding the complaints.
The bin-liner question
Decide it in writing. Either the contractor supplies and bills consumables at cost plus a margin, or the client buys their own stock and the cleaners simply fit and refill. Both work. What doesn’t work is discovering, three weeks into a contract in a busy Soho serviced office, that nobody ever agreed which, and the toilet roll has become a small diplomatic incident with an email chain of its own.
Why do the cheapest quotes come with the thinnest scopes?
Because the thinness is the strategy.
I’ll say it plainly, since somebody should: the lowest quote on a London cleaning tender is very often the one to bin first. Not always. But the gap between the cheap bid and the sensible one is rarely down to efficiency. The cheap bid buys its headline number by narrowing the scope – quietly, deliberately – so the money finds its way back later through variations and periodic “extras” a fuller spec would simply have folded into the monthly figure. On the contractor’s side, a vague scope is usually a choice. It’s a pricing tactic, and a fairly clever one, and you can’t really blame someone for playing a game the tender set up.
The managing agent’s copy-paste spec
The other reliable source of thin scopes is the managing agent running the building. A managed floor in the City or over at More London tends to arrive with a cleaning spec the agent has pasted straight from the last building, and the one before that, tailored to none of them. It’ll list tasks for a marble reception you haven’t got and say nothing at all about the two kitchens you have. Read it as though it were written for your floor specifically, because it wasn’t, and every gap in it is yours to inherit.
What happens when someone asks for something that isn’t in the contract?
Something always does. A leaving do in the boardroom that leaves forty prosecco glasses and a carpet full of trodden crisps. Builder’s dust settling over every surface for a fortnight after the refit on the floor above. A burst pipe up in the ceiling void that comes through on a Sunday and turns Monday into a salvage operation. None of it belongs in the nightly scope, and none of it should.
A contract worth signing says so, and says what happens next. It carries a variation mechanism – a clause setting out how out-of-scope work is requested and priced before anyone lifts a mop, ideally with an agreed hourly and day rate already sitting in the schedule so there’s no haggling in the middle of a crisis. Without one, every unplanned job becomes a fresh negotiation held at the worst possible moment, when the thing plainly needs doing and you’ve no room left to bargain.
Changing hands, and the TUPE surprise
Then one day the contract changes hands, and the scope starts mattering in a way people rarely see coming. When a cleaning contract in the UK moves from one provider to the next, TUPE usually applies – the existing cleaning staff transfer across to the incoming contractor on their existing terms and conditions. The new provider inherits the people, but they price and deliver against the scope. A fuzzy scope, then, doesn’t stop causing trouble when your current cleaners walk. It gets handed on, unresolved, to the next lot, who are left guessing at what “clean and tidy” was ever supposed to mean while absorbing a wage bill they didn’t set.
Which is roughly where my friend’s facilities manager found herself. Two pages, one useless sentence, and a kitchen nobody could prove was in or out.