What Happens to the Cleaners When We Change Contractor Mid-Contract? A Plain Answer on TUPE

They stay.

That is the answer nine times out of ten, and it is the part clients find hardest to believe when they have just spent four months running a tender to get away from a service they were unhappy with. The badge on the polo shirt changes. The van outside changes. The woman who has done your second floor at half five every evening for six years does not change, because the law moves her across to whoever wins, on the terms she already has.

Does TUPE apply when you change your cleaning contractor?

Nearly always, in office cleaning. The Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 2006 cover two situations, and the one that catches you is the service provision change – where activities stop being carried out by one contractor and start being carried out by another on the same client’s behalf. A change of contractor, outsourcing for the first time, or bringing the work back in-house can all trigger it.

In-house does not get you out of it either. I have had this conversation twice this year, once with a serviced office operator in Clerkenwell who was convinced that hiring directly meant starting fresh. It means the same transfer, with you as the new employer and no contractor to absorb the liability.

The one condition clients trip over

There has to be an organised grouping of employees whose principal purpose is doing the work for you. A dedicated evening team of nine at a Canary Wharf floor is textbook. The awkward cases are the small ones – a single cleaner covering four unrelated buildings for two hours each, dispatched from a pool. If nobody has organised that person around your site specifically, the argument gets thin, and it is worth taking advice rather than assuming.

The activities also have to remain fundamentally the same after the change. Clients occasionally try to engineer their way out of this by rewriting the specification so heavily that the new service looks like a different animal. It rarely works, tribunals see through thin versions of it, and you have just designed your cleaning provision around an employment law argument rather than around whether the building gets clean.

What transfers with them, and what does that cost you?

Everything. Continuous service, contractual terms, holiday entitlement, notice periods, outstanding grievances, unpaid wage claims, the lot. The incoming contractor also inherits liabilities the outgoing one created – an unresolved disciplinary, a pending tribunal claim, three years of underpaid holiday pay. Same people, different badge.

This is where tender prices stop making sense to people. Two contractors quote for the same Holborn building. One comes in eight per cent higher and the buyer assumes greed. The higher price usually reflects someone who has read the employee liability information properly and priced the payroll they are taking on.

Why the incoming price rises when the payroll is old

Long-serving cleaning staff in London carry expensive terms. Somebody who transferred in from a 2011 contract might hold thirty days’ holiday, an enhanced sick pay scheme that was competitive at the time and is unheard of now, and a shift premium for Sunday work that no current contractor offers on new hires. All of it moves. None of it can be quietly harmonised away six weeks later.

Add the pay floor. A Bromley industrial estate and a Paddington headquarters building can run identical specifications and hours with a thirty per cent gap in the wage bill, because one is paying the statutory minimum and the other has committed to the London Living Wage. If your outgoing contractor was accredited and the transferring team is on that rate, the rate transfers with them. You cannot use a change of contractor as a route back down to the legal minimum.

Pensions are the one carve-out worth knowing about. Rights under an occupational pension scheme relating to old age and survivors’ benefits do not transfer in the ordinary way, though the incoming employer picks up auto-enrolment duties and, in most outsourced cleaning contracts, a defined contribution arrangement that looks near enough identical from the employee’s side. It is a technical exception that almost never produces a saving.

I would rather clients heard this before the tender than after. The number of London office managers who have run a competitive process expecting a fifteen per cent saving, then found the only genuine variable was margin and management overhead, is high enough that I now raise it in the first meeting.

Who has to tell the cleaners, and when?

The outgoing contractor. Not you, and not the incoming one, though in practice all three end up in the room.

Both employers have a duty to inform and consult with appropriate representatives about the fact of the transfer, when it will happen, and any measures they envisage taking in connection with it. Measures means changes – new uniform, new reporting line, a different start time, a switch from weekly to monthly pay. That last one comes up constantly and clients underestimate it. A weekly wage and a monthly one are two different household budgets, and if it is announced by email on a Thursday you will lose people who had every intention of staying.

The 28-day file nobody wants to hand over

Employee liability information has to reach the incoming employer at least twenty-eight days before the transfer: names, ages, particulars of employment, disciplinary and grievance history over the past two years, live and potential legal claims, applicable collective agreements. It is a legal obligation with a compensatory award attached for failure.

It also arrives late more often than not. Outgoing contractors who have just lost a contract they held for eleven years are not enthusiastic about paperwork, and the person who compiled it has often already been reassigned. My standing advice to clients is to make the deadline a condition in the outgoing contract’s exit provisions, with the final invoice held against it. Contractors respond to money in a way they do not respond to regulations.

Even when it arrives on time, treat it as a starting document. I have seen a schedule for a King’s Cross building list six cleaners where eleven turned up on day one, the difference being agency workers who had been on site so long that everyone had forgotten they were agency.

Can the new contractor change the team or their terms?

Barely, and this is the part that undermines the whole exercise for most clients.

Dismissing somebody because of the transfer is automatically unfair. The only route through is an economic, technical or organisational reason entailing changes in the workforce – a real reduction in headcount because the building has shed two floors, say, or a genuine reorganisation of roles. You cannot claim one because you would rather have your own supervisor than the one who came across. Neither is a client saying they never liked the man on the ground floor.

Terms are similarly locked. Variations connected with the transfer are void unless there is an ETO reason, which means the new contractor is running your building with staff on four different sets of terms and no straightforward way to level them.

Cutting hours is a variation of contract

The most common accident I see. A new specification reduces the evening clean from three hours to two and a half across a Canada Water floorplate, the client signs it off as an operational change, and nobody registers that they have just cut ten per cent from six people’s wages. That is a contractual variation connected to the transfer and it is void. The cleaner can work the reduced hours and claim the shortfall.

There is a related trap in start times. A landlord in Ealing decided the cleaning should move from six in the evening to five in the morning so the building looked presentable at eight. Operationally sensible. For a team of six women who had built childcare around evening work, it was a fundamental change to working conditions, and two of them resigned and claimed. The transfer had happened three weeks earlier.

Reductions do happen legitimately. They need consultation, agreement, and usually a genuine ETO reason behind them, and they need to happen properly rather than as a line on a schedule of works.

So when should you leave the contract alone?

More often than the industry likes to admit, and I say that as somebody who bids for this work.

Here is the test. Write down what is wrong with your current service. If the list is dust on high-level surfaces, washroom consumables running out on Fridays, and nobody answering emails, you have a supervision and specification problem. A new contractor moves the same nine people onto a different payroll and hands you a new account manager. Same people, different badge. The dust is still on the pipework above the meeting room in Wembley Park because nobody has ever specified who cleans above two metres or how often.

Fix the specification, escalate to the contractor’s operations director in writing, give it a quarter. If it does not move, then tender, and tender on management quality rather than price, because the wage bill is largely fixed by law before anyone opens a bid.

What the 2026 review might change

The Government launched a call for evidence on TUPE in April 2026, closing on 1 July, as part of its wider commitment to strengthen employee protections. It asked, among other things, whether the ETO restriction on varying terms strikes the right balance and whether the cost of transfers is too high for businesses. No timetable for changes has been set out.

My reading is that harmonisation will get easier for incoming employers before it gets harder, though anyone planning a 2027 tender around that assumption is gambling with somebody else’s contract.

Nothing in the regulations stops you knowing the names of the people who clean your building. Same people, different badge, and most of them have been there longer than you have.