A skills shortage has been seen for years across these sectors and by 2019 this was widely accepted as a labour crisis, add to that that almost 300,000 people in the hospitality sector have left their jobs since March 2020 including cleaning operatives, kitchen porters and housekeeping personnel and you can see why cleaning companies and hospitality businesses are struggling to find staff.

Migrant workers made up to 37% of the English cleaning workforce pre COVID and Brexit but with new sponsor licences being required to employ from outside the UK now along with a minimum salary of £25,600, this reduces the pool of candidates available for jobs that do not pay this.

The national living wage in the UK is £8.91 yet based on a person working 37.5 hours a week, they would need to be being paid in excess of £13.00 an hour to be eligible for the immigration system and with there still being a stigma to many Brits of working as a cleaner. the question remains how do cleaning companies ensure they can continue to recruit effectively allowing them to deliver the best service possible?

If COVID has shown us anything, it is how important cleaning is and what a value professional cleaning is to be businesses and society as a whole and that is why here at USS we educate and encourage our clients to value the service that our operatives deliver allowing us to pay above the national living wage when possible.

In addition to this, we offer part time vacancies in addition to full time, hours and shifts that suit individual circumstances, a range of training programmes and personal development, an employee of the month and refer a friend scheme and promotion from within. In fact lots of our operatives have gone on to be supervisors and on some occasions beyond that to managerial positions.

If you’d like to find out more about working for USS, we’re recruiting now so why not get in touch to discuss what opportunities are available.

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Employers are concerned about staffing levels and staff are concerned about their rights to remain in the UK, in the short term there could be some teething problems but if proper safeguards are not implemented moving forward, the impact could be catastrophic.

Being part of the EU has certainly meant that labour has been easier to find, to date 180,000 people have settled in the UK each year from neighbouring EU countries. The downsides of this however have been people entering the country illegally with fake passports, people migrating here but still flying back to their native country to collect benefits there or people claiming benefits here but sending them home overseas.  Brexit may reduce this and ultimately give us a more stable workforce of established and experienced staff.

The greatest challenge we envisage for the cleaning sector will be resourcing staff, low skilled workers are just as critical as highly skilled workers if the country is to run successfully.  It has been reassuring to hear that this is being taken into consideration and the Immigration Minister has been debating a points based systems for sectors such as cleaning and hospitality but whatever lays ahead, the flow of labour will drop.

So what can we do about it?  Switching from many part time staff to less full time staff, apprenticeships to encourage careers within the sector and employing and training ex-servicemen are just a few things to consider and why wait to see what happens over the coming months politically, take control now and the cleaning sector could shine.

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Customers have been confused and frustrated since 2014 when energy efficiency and performance labelling was introduced for vacuum cleaners so the sooner these regulations are amended or scrapped the better.

Currently manufacturers not only have to show energy efficiency but also have to score their vacuum cleaners on how well they perform e.g. dirt pick up from carpets, hard floors and crevices, dust emissions and noise levels but did you know the better they perform in these areas, the harder the vacuum is to push and where as we use our hoovers to pick up fluff, hair and fibre the tests carried out require that a special type of sand be used.

The current labelling regulations bear very little use to the use of our vacuum cleaners in the real world.  They also don’t help us to compare one machine against another.

Naturally anyone thinking of purchasing a vacuum cleaner is likely to buy one with an A rating yet there is no guarantee that the machine will meet the customer’s expectations and at present it is very hard for manufacturers to produce a vacuum cleaner that both performs well and achieves good ratings.

Now’s the opportunity for the government  to kill the flawed EU label and come up with a well-conceived energy level that is actually useful and easily understood by customers, we’ll be watching and waiting to see if customers post-brexit are put first.

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