London Living Wage

At Regular Cleaning, we are so proud to be a Real Living Wage employer.

With sustainability at the core of our values, we recognise the importance of paying a sustainable wage to all colleagues. This in turn supports the very best service for our valued clients.

In September 2024, the Living Wage Foundation announced the new wage rates for 2024-2025, with a deadline of 1st May 2025 to implement these. Following the news of these new rates, we’re celebrating last year’s wins.

Let’s Talk about Fair Pay

The real living wage is the hourly rate working people need to afford a minimum ‘decent’ standard of living. We strive for this as we value our front line workers and believe they deserve fair pay. For some, this might mean that they can afford to have just one job instead of multiple, or earn a wage that they can live on and enjoy.

Last year, we set a target for 80% of cleaning colleagues to be enjoying the higher rate of £13.15 by the end of the 2024 financial year. We’re delighted to be able to say that we have achieved a total of 85% of colleagues being paid the Real Living Wage, and 88% paid the London Living Wage by June 2024.

We’ve worked hard to move our colleagues to these higher rates and are proud of our progress and achievements. We know the positive effect this has for both our colleagues and clients, meaning more than just an increase in pay. It also means better quality of life and an improved sense of wellbeing. We welcome this as we’ve heard from our colleagues just how impactful this can be for them during a time of an increasingly higher cost of living.

Stepping Up to Pay a Fair Wage

Naturally the focus is on the welfare of our colleagues, however, it’s important to acknowledge the benefits for clients. There are innumerable benefits to paying the Real Living Wage and employees often share how much it means to them. These include an improvement in motivation, attendance, productivity, and reliability. We look to proactively collaborate with clients to solve any issues surrounding this, and offer support and solutions to those that aren’t confident to move to the higher rates.

“Not having to worry if [I’m] able to pay my bills had a very positive impact on my mental health and increased my motivation.”

Geovani at Lion Plaza

Not only does this better the quality of life for colleagues, but also increases the value of service for our clients, through hugely improved retention and recruitment. Our average length of service for our employees is five years. This means that our colleagues are experts at what they do and can provide the best service possible. We want the very best for our clients and know that this comes from providing the best for our colleagues.

As a Living Wage Recognised Service Provider, we strive for a real living wage for all employees as part of our Better Places strategy. Caring is part of our identity and we’re committed to always putting people first. This means caring for colleagues, communities and clients and know that paying a Real Living Wage is part of that.

How are we doing?

Regular Cleaning has been working to get frontline colleagues moved to the current London Living Wage rates announced last year. We’re reflecting on the progress we’ve made so far to ensure all colleagues are paid the Living Wage or above.

As a cleaning company, we recognise our responsibility is for frontline colleagues’ well-being first and provide safe and healthy working conditions. Since the new rates were announced, it has become our priority to get the maximum number of colleagues earning this recommended amount.

The Challenge

The Living Wage Foundation announced the current wage rates for 2022/23 in September 2022 at £11.95. A deadline of May 2023 was set by the Foundation to implement these, or risk losing accreditation. We’re taking a look at what we’ve achieved so far to meet this.

It’s important for us to work alongside our clients to get as many colleagues as possible on these new rates. We’re committed to being socially responsible and a huge part of this is ensuring our team are paid fairly.

This doesn’t come without a few challenges. As a business we’ve worked hard to find solutions, collaborate with clients, and spread the word about why it’s so important to pay the London Living Wage.

Goal

We set targets for 65% of cleaning colleagues to be enjoying the current rate of £11.95 by summer 2023.

The real living wage is the hourly rate needed for working people to afford a minimum ‘decent’ standard of living. We’re so passionate about this and want our frontline workers to feel valued and motivated to do the best possible job. We believe our colleagues deserve fair pay that reflects the true cost of living. This allows some colleagues to have one job instead of multiple, and others to have a bit left over for enjoying a hobby.

Solution and Benefits

So what are the benefits of paying the real living wage?

This deadline acknowledges more than just an increase in pay for our colleagues. It also represents an improved quality of life and a higher sense of well-being.

We look to proactively collaborate with clients to solve any issues surrounding this and offer support and solutions to those that aren’t confident to move to the higher rates.

While we want to focus on the welfare of colleagues, it’s important to acknowledge this also sees benefits for clients. It’s been proven that paying a real wage is good for business, improving motivation, attendance, productivity, and reliability. Not only does this improve the quality of life for colleagues, it increases the value of service for our clients. This hugely improves retention and recruitment for clients.

We’ve seen first-hand the impact of moving to higher rates, with some clients who choose not to pay the living wage having difficulty to recruit and retain workers and, in some instances, seeing a fall in standards. Through word-of-mouth, colleagues are queuing to join sites where they know they will receive fair pay. People want to work for a Living Wage Employer, giving clients the knowledge that they will receive the best and most reliable service.

Our average length of service for our employees is five years. This means that our colleagues are experts at what they do and can provide the best service. We want the very best for our clients and know that this comes from in turn, providing the best we can for our colleagues.

“I was pleasantly surprised by the pay rise I received in January this year, as this shows to me that… clients and Regular Cleaning care about their staff. As you know with the cost-of-living crisis all [our] bills keep going up, and this helps me out going forward in a big way and shows to me [our] clients appreciate all the hard work we do.”

Peter, Regular Cleaning Colleague

Results

We set targets for 65% of cleaning colleagues to be enjoying the higher rate of £11.95 by the May deadline. We’re proud to say that we’ve surpassed our goal and achieved 79.4%.

We know that we’ve done well to move to this higher rate and the positive effect this will have both on our clients’ experience and our employees lives.

We’re Proud to be a Real Living Wage Provider. As a socially responsible family cleaning company, it’s part of our identity to recognise the Real London Living Wage. We push for sustainable business and caring for our colleagues, communities and clients.