What should be in a communal cleaning specification

Why a block needs one written down

Most communal cleaning arrangements are a price and a frequency. Twice a week, a figure a month, and nothing else on paper. That holds up until somebody complains, and then there is no document to settle it with. The cleaner says the bin store was never in the price. The resident says it has not been touched since March. The director in the middle has nothing to point at.

A specification is the thing you point at. It is not a legal document and it does not need a solicitor. It is a list of what gets cleaned, how often, and what proof comes back. Once it exists, three things get easier at once. Quotes become comparable, complaints become answerable, and the cleaning line on the service charge becomes something you can explain at the AGM rather than defend.

What follows is a model you can copy, change and send out to tender. Delete whatever does not apply to your block. None of it is specific to us, and you are welcome to use it with a contractor you already have.

Write it by frequency, not by room

The usual mistake is to write the specification room by room. A paragraph on the lobby, a paragraph on the stairs, a paragraph on the bin store. It reads well in the office and it is no use on site, because the cleaner still has to work out what belongs to today and what is a monthly job.

Write it by frequency instead, and list the tasks by area inside each one. Every visit. Weekly. Monthly. Quarterly. Once or twice a year. The cleaner gets a round they can follow, and you get five short lists to inspect against instead of one long one nobody reads.

Every visit

The core round. If a visit happens and these are not done, the visit did not happen.

• Entrance lobby floor cleaned, matting lifted and the floor underneath it done
• Glazed entrance doors, frames and door furniture cleaned of hand marks
• Stair treads, nosings and landings vacuumed or mopped
• Handrails and balustrades wiped along their full length
• Corridor floors cleaned, hard and carpeted
• Lift car floor, walls, mirrors and call buttons cleaned
• Lift door tracks cleared of grit
• Loose post, leaflets and litter cleared from communal floors
• Spillages dealt with, or reported the same day if they need more than the round allows
• Logbook signed and timed before leaving

Weekly

In a busy block with a lift and a through route, most of this moves up into every visit.

• Fire doors, closers and vision panels wiped
• Flat entrance doors and frames wiped on the communal side
• Light switches, sockets and the intercom panel wiped
• Notice boards and signage wiped
• Internal communal glazing cleaned at reachable height
• Cobwebs taken down from corners, ceilings and above the main door
• Bin store floor swept
• Steps, the doorway and the approach to the main door swept

Monthly

• Skirtings, risers and stair stringers dusted through
• Marks spot-cleaned from communal walls where the surface allows it
• Light fittings and diffusers dusted
• Window sills, frames and glazing beads wiped
• Bin store floor washed down
• Meter cupboard doors and service riser doors wiped
• Bike and pram stores swept
• Entrance channels and drain gullies cleared of leaves

Quarterly

• Stairwell and landing windows cleaned inside, and outside where they can be reached safely from the ground or from within the building
• High-level dusting of ledges, pipework and ceiling corners
• Carpet edges and under-stair corners detailed by hand
• Hard floor edges and corners scrubbed where a mop does not reach
• Lift door runners stripped of compacted grit
• Bin store washed down and deodorised

Once or twice a year, priced on a separate line

These are the jobs that keep a block looking cared for rather than merely tidy, and they are the ones most often missing from a specification, because they do not belong in the monthly figure.

Put the dates in the specification anyway, even though the price sits separately. It is easier to budget for when it is written down a year ahead, and far easier to explain to leaseholders than an unexpected invoice in November.

• Communal carpets cleaned by hot water extraction
• Hard floors deep scrubbed, or stripped and resealed, depending on the floor
• External glass and any window above ground floor, by a contractor equipped to work at height

The things people forget to put in

A specification written from memory at a desk misses the same things every time. Walk the block with a notebook before you write it, and look up as well as down.

• The underside and the back of the entrance matting
• The lift door track, where the grit collects and what makes the doors judder
• The glass above the main door, and the ledge above that
• Fire door vision panels, which show every hand mark in the building
• The bin store floor, which is a different job from the bins
• Who puts the bins out, who brings them back in, and on which day
• Light diffusers, which fill with dust and dead flies and make a well-lit hallway look dim
• The strip of path between the front door and the pavement
• Cigarette ends in the doorway and along the frontage
• What happens to fly-tipped and bulk items, which should be photographed and reported rather than removed, unless you have separately engaged a licensed waste carrier to take them

Say what proof you get

A specification that lists tasks and says nothing about evidence is half written. The reason a director usually cannot answer a complaint is not that the work was skipped. It is that nobody can show it was done.

Three things are worth insisting on, and none of them costs a contractor anything. A dated logbook that lives in the block and is signed at every attendance. Photographs sent through after each visit, or each week on a smaller round. A named supervisor who comes to site, rather than an office number.

Write in what happens when a visit is missed, too. Weather, illness and traffic are real. What matters is whether you are told on the day and whether it is made up. One line saying a missed attendance is reported the same day and made good within an agreed number of working days will settle almost every argument before it starts.

Set the frequency honestly

Frequency is where money goes astray in both directions. A six-flat conversion with a side entrance and no lift does not need three visits a week, and buying them will not make it cleaner. A sixty-flat block with a lift, an internal bin store and a through route to the car park will look neglected on one.

What pushes frequency up: a lift, a bin store inside the building, carpet rather than hard floor, short lets or student tenancies, a nursery or a gym in the block, and an entrance that opens onto a main road. What pulls it down: hard floors throughout, a small number of flats, residents who are out all day, and no communal carpet anywhere.

Put a review date in the specification. Blocks change. A specification nobody revisits is how a block ends up paying for a round it outgrew five years ago, or struggling along on one it outgrew last winter.

Putting it out to quote

Send the same document to everybody. That is the whole point of having written it. Three quotes against three different sets of assumptions tell you nothing, and the cheapest of them is usually the one that has quietly left the bin store out.

Ask each contractor to price the attendance round and the periodic work separately, so you can see what sits inside the monthly figure. Ask what happens on a bank holiday. Ask whether the same cleaner attends each time, because continuity is most of what residents actually notice.

Then ask what they would change about your specification. Anyone who has cleaned blocks for a living will spot something you have asked for that cannot be done in the time, or something obvious you have left out. How they answer that will tell you more about them than their price does.

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