Winning cleaning and FM tenders: TUPE, priced hours and mobilisation

Evaluators assume you can clean. In a cleaning or facilities management tender, they are testing whether you can take on another contractor's staff, price the hours honestly and start on day one without the service slipping. This guide covers staff transfers, priced hours and mobilisation.

What the transfer rules mean when a cleaning contract changes hands

The Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 2006, known as TUPE, protect employees when the work they do moves to a new employer. For contracted services this is called a service provision change: a client contracting out a service for the first time, moving it to a new contractor, or bringing it back in-house.

TUPE applies to that change when all of these are true:

there is an organised group of employees whose main purpose is doing this work for this client
the work after the change is fundamentally the same as before
the client does not intend the work to be a single event or a short one-off task
the work is not wholly or mainly the supply of goods

A cleaning team assigned to a council's buildings on a multi-year contract will usually meet that test. A one-off deep clean usually will not. If the tender says TUPE is likely to apply, plan on the staff transferring to you.

What transfers with the staff

Employment contracts and length of service. Their continuous service carries over.
Pay and terms. Hourly rates, overtime, allowances, sick pay and holiday entitlement.
Liabilities. Unpaid wages and accrued holiday that has not been taken.
Collective agreements that apply to the transferring staff.

Occupational pension schemes are the main exception, but not a free pass. Where staff had an employer-funded workplace pension, you must offer a reasonable alternative. Acas, the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service, says this means matching employee contributions up to 6%. Staff who were originally public sector employees may have protected access to a public service pension, for example under the government's Fair Deal policy.

After the transfer you cannot change terms because of the transfer itself. The exceptions are a change that improves terms, a change the contract already allows, or an "economic, technical or organisational" (ETO) reason that involves a change in the workforce. Making someone redundant without a valid ETO reason is automatically unfair dismissal.

The information you get, and when

At tender stage, most buyers include an anonymised TUPE list from the current contractor: roles, hours, pay rates, length of service and any enhanced terms. Read it line by line. It is the base of your labour cost.

The formal employee liability information comes later. The outgoing contractor must give it to you at least 28 days before the transfer. It includes:

each employee's identity and age
their written statement of employment particulars
disciplinary and grievance cases from the last two years
claims made in the last two years, or claims the outgoing employer expects
collective agreements that will carry on after the transfer

Both employers must also inform and consult employee representatives. As the incoming contractor, you must tell the outgoing contractor about any "measures" you plan that will affect transferring staff, in time for them to consult.

For public sector work, also watch the Employment Rights Act 2025. It lets the government bring in a statutory code to prevent "two-tier" workforces in public sector outsourcing, which the government has said it expects from October 2026.

Why priced hours must reconcile with the specification

The specification says what must be cleaned and how often. Your pricing schedule says how many hours you will provide. Evaluators compare the two, and hours that cannot deliver the frequencies undermine every quality answer.

Under the Procurement Act 2023, a buyer that considers a price abnormally low must tell you and give you a reasonable opportunity to show you can deliver the contract for that price. If you cannot, it may disregard your tender. Your workings need to survive that conversation.

Build your hours from the bottom up, area by area:

Column	What it shows
Area or room type	Taken from the buyer's schedule: offices, washrooms, circulation, kitchens
Size	Square metres, or number of fittings
Frequency	Exactly as the specification states: daily, weekly, periodic
Output rate	Your own measured productivity for that task and surface
Hours per week	Size multiplied by frequency, divided by output rate

Then add what the floor plan does not show: travel between sites, supervision, periodic tasks, and holiday and sickness cover. Compare the total with the TUPE list. If current staff work more hours than you have priced, explain the gap.

Your hourly rate must stay lawful for the whole term. The National Living Wage for workers aged 21 and over rose to £12.71 an hour in April 2026. Add employer National Insurance, holiday pay, pensions and any enhancements on the TUPE list. If the buyer asks for the Real Living Wage, a voluntary rate set by the Living Wage Foundation, price it from day one, and check how the contract handles annual increases.

For National Health Service (NHS) work, link your hours to the National Standards of Healthcare Cleanliness 2025. They set six functional risk categories, FR1 to FR6, each with its own audit frequency and target score. Show that your frequencies and audit plan match the category of each area.

How to write a credible mobilisation plan

A mobilisation plan explains how you get from award to a stable service. Weak plans list phases. Strong plans give dates, owners and checks. Work back from go-live and cover at least:

Award to week one. Name the mobilisation lead, hold a client kick-off meeting and request the employee liability information.
Consultation. Meet the transferring staff. Explain any measures and answer questions on pay, uniforms and rotas.
Checks. You have 60 calendar days from the transfer date to carry out fresh right to work checks on staff who transfer to you under TUPE. Plan any other vetting the contract asks for, such as Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) checks.
Payroll. Set up every transferring employee on the correct rates before the first pay date.
Equipment. Confirm delivery of machines, chemicals, colour-coded kit and uniforms, with safety data sheets and risk assessments for each site.
Training. Site induction, the client's procedures, and any gaps in training records.
First month. Supervisor on site from day one, first audit and first client review.

Present this as a table with a date, an owner by role and the record you will keep. Then add a short risk list. What happens if the employee liability information arrives late, fewer staff transfer than expected, or equipment is delayed? A plan that expects problems is more credible than one that assumes none.

Common reasons cleaning bids fail

Hours that do not add up. The pricing schedule does not match the specification, or the total sits well below the TUPE list with no explanation.
TUPE treated as a footnote. Accrued holiday, enhanced sick pay, pensions and protected rates are missing from the price.
Generic mobilisation. Phases with no dates, no named roles and no mention of the actual sites.
Audits without action. An audit schedule that never says who fixes a failed area, or how fast.
No site knowledge. Nothing about the buildings, opening hours or access rules, even when a site visit was offered.

Before you submit

Put the specification, pricing schedule and TUPE list side by side. Every frequency needs hours, every transferring employee needs a cost, and every mobilisation step needs a date and an owner.

If you would like a second view on a cleaning or facilities management (FM) tender, from reading the TUPE list to checking your hours, get in touch. You can also read how we approach cleaning and FM bids.

All insights →