G4S to clean Pennine hospitals

From the G4S website:-

G4S Integrated Services (G4S) has been awarded a five-year contract to deliver healthcare cleaning services for Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust in Greater Manchester.

The contract worth up to £56m, will involve G4S providing cleaning services to four hospitals in the Trust: North Manchester General Hospital, The Royal Oldham Hospital, Fairfield General Hospital (Bury), Rochdale Infirmary and a specialist neurological rehabilitation unit. Together these hospitals serve some 800,000 people in the community.

The contract is the largest FM contract awarded to G4S in healthcare, with staff responsible for over 184,000 square metres of premises and 1,960 in-patient beds. It represents a quarter of the total serviced across all the company’s existing soft FM contracts at 173 FM serviced healthcare sites in the UK.

More than 550 staff are expected to transfer across to G4S under TUPE employment regulations from 1st May 2013 when the contract commences.

Bob Taylor, Managing Director of G4S Integrated Services, said:

“We’re delighted to be working with Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust. We have an 11 year track record to be proud of delivering professional FM services to healthcare businesses across the country and look forward to supporting the people of Greater Manchester.”

Pam Miller, Associate Director of Facilities, Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, said:

“We are delighted to award the cleaning services contract to G4S and we look forward to working with them to deliver a clean and safe environment for patients, staff and visitors across all our hospital sites.”

“We’re confident that G4S will deliver the essential services necessary for the smooth running of all our premises to the highest standards.”

G4S Integrated Services has a strong healthcare FM business portfolio, operating PFI healthcare FM contracts since 2002 at Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre, Oxford and from 2005, The Churchill Hospital, Oxford. In 2006 G4S was awarded its first shorter term healthcare FM contract from NHS Surrey, closely followed by NHS Tower Hamlets & East London Foundation Trust. G4S is well-established in the north of England with contracts at the Royal Sunderland Hospital and Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust. The coompany services 25 main hospitals covering an area of 790,525 square metres and 7,339 in-patient beds and provide FM services to a total of 173 healthcare sites. /

So G4S - fresh from their sucess at securing the Olympics - have scored a dead worth "up to" £56 million for five years.

My back of the calculator figures say that's £11.2m per year for the 550 staff, or approx £20k per person per year. While I'm not taking into account the cost of cleaning supplies (not really my field of expertise), it seems that someone is earning quite a lot for taking over the costs of employiment (HR, Payroll, NI, etc) as the cleaning staff won't be earning anywhere close to £20k per year,

Am I being too cynical in wondering how much profit G4S is making from this or is £60 per year per square meter of floor space an appropriate rate to be paying for cleaning?

You can't have outside contractors cleaning hospitals.

Cleaning in a hospital is a round-the-clock job and in my opinion any cleaning staff should take direction from staff in the hospital not someone in G4S HQ somewhere.

Will these jobs go to local people?

Hinch wrote:Existing domestic staff will be transferred to G4S under TUPE (Transfer of Undertakings: Public Employment) legislation Sparky.

Ah.. please forgive me my ignorance, Hinch.

So they TUPE 'em over rather than pay "redundancy" and then pay a lesser rate for the same job in which case employees either, a). leave b). stay begrudingly or c). b closely followed by a

Or am I being too cynical here?

Hinch wrote:Too cynical by half Sparks.

They have to transfer them over on same pay, terms and conditions. They still need at least as many cleaners so no staff will be made redundant; including the managers and supervisors.

Any staff who don't want to transfer over will just be deemed to have resigned.

It's actually a good piece of legislation and protects staff.

It wasn't the legislation I was having a go at, Hinch. The dig was at the way it sometimes works in practice.

I'm sure someone once told me they have been "tuped" and they only received the wage they were on (before being tuped) for a year or two then were relegated to a lower wage in line with other staff from their new company. This took place at a hospital in Yorkshire.

The ISS cleaning was scaled back in the non-clinical areas a couple of years ago to reduce costs, with cleaning staff doing less hours or covering more areas. Staff have to empty their own office bins, and offices are vacuumed only when requested, and not more than once per month. I presume (hope) the clinical areas operate on a different basis! To be honest the ward cleaning is closely monitored and reported.
I'm not sure how much it costs for the directors to empty their bins at their hourly rates.

Hinch wrote:Too cynical by half Sparks.

They have to transfer them over on same pay, terms and conditions. They still need at least as many cleaners so no staff will be made redundant; including the managers and supervisors.

Any staff who don't want to transfer over will just be deemed to have resigned.

It's actually a good piece of legislation and protects staff.

I thought there was cases that they kept the contracts when sold out to private companies from the public sector. Only after a short time for the private company to change the contract for worse conditions for the workers involved.

Will the new masters in power try and change it in the long term Hinch!

Just goes to prove quality doesn't count any more "disgusting "

At least with G4S, if they can't cope with the work and provide enough resources, then they can always call up their backup, i.e. the British Army, to fill in for them.

I wonder when the Pennine Acute staff will be told of the change in cleaning contractors, although staff aren't always told when their own terms and conditions have been changed.

Hinch wrote:At yesterday's Central Shop Stewards Committee, I heard that my successor from the RCN was praising PFI schemes.

The times most definitely are a changing!

Surprising what people will say to "hang on in there" regardless of the truth

Even after PFI has already bankrupted and destroyed several health trusts already????

PFI is just plain evil - bad, expensive inflexible loans that allow politicians and councillors to show off overpriced shiny new buildings to boost their personal image, at the expense of long term debt, the burden of which falls on the public and future governing parties. The holders of the PFI deals see them as guaranteed cash generators. Many of the buildings will be underused, run-down and unsuitable long before the PFI contracts are paid off.

The lack of PFI, and reliance on conventional public finance must the best management strategy of the last 10 years of Pennine Acute.

There is a puzzling, continuing absence of any communication to staff about the G4S cleaning contract, despite it being very publicly announced by G4S on 19th February. Perhaps the Pennine PR machine has been restructured, or they are just too embarrassed to announce the decision. Surely the commitment to spending £56,000,000 deserves a mention. Perhaps staff will only find out when the cleaning staff turn up on 1 May in different uniforms (or there is a sudden influx of army personnel armed with mops and vacuum cleaners!).

I remember a quote from a senior economist at the World Bank from about 10 years (which sadly I can't find the original of, but a search shows it's been said quite often) about how bad an idea PFI (or PPP as it's also known) is -

"Buying anything through a PFI scheme is like buying your house on a credit card."

What's even worse about these PFI schemes - more than the huge amounts of money over what it'd cost to just build it - is that they generally don't have any clause about actually owning the building at the end, so the owner is then free to kick out the tenants and repurpose is as they want. So I'd say it's more akin to renting your house on a credit card.

If you're interested in more, Mark Thomas has written a lot about how bad an idea PFI is.

When will the management start listening ?

http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/all-about/rochdale?all=true

To be fair this is just changing the company to whom the service has been outsourced for many years.
It does seem odd when the existing company is performing reasonably well, and G4S have had so much bad publicity, but they must have had the lowest bid.
Poor performance does result in fines, but total fines of about £1000 a month or so, which is the approximate current level, won't scare a company raking in over £10,000,000 per year under the new deal.

Cleaning staff are wondering what their new uniforms will be, and if they will be practical, and also hoping that they will get some new equipment. The vacuum cleaners that are in use at the moment are very old and ineffective (office staff have been known to bring in their own Dysons from home to get a thorough clean). The cleaning staff are very worried about whether their hours and working times will be maintained, and disappointed at the lack of communication and consultation.