What the law actually requires
If you employ anyone: including part-time and casual cleaners: UK health and safety law places specific duties on you. The main ones for a cleaning business are these.
- Risk assessments. You must assess the risks your work creates. If you have five or more employees, the significant findings must be recorded in writing.
- COSHH assessments. The Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations require you to assess and control exposure to hazardous chemicals. Cleaning products are squarely in scope.
- A health and safety policy. Required in writing once you have five or more employees.
- Employers' liability insurance. Legally required from the moment you employ anyone, with substantial daily penalties for trading without it.
- PPE. You must provide suitable personal protective equipment free of charge where the risk assessment requires it, and ensure it is used.
- Training and information. Staff must be told about the risks and trained to work safely, in a way they actually understand.
- RIDDOR reporting. Certain injuries, diseases and dangerous occurrences must be reported to the HSE.
Below five employees the written requirements relax, but the duty to assess and control risk does not. And in practice, any commercial client will ask for documentation regardless of your headcount.
COSHH: the one that matters most in cleaning
Cleaning chemicals are the defining hazard of the trade. Bleach, acidic descalers, oven cleaners containing caustic soda and industrial degreasers all cause serious injuries in UK cleaning every year: most commonly chemical burns, respiratory damage and eye injuries.
A COSHH assessment is not a form you fill in once. It is per product and per task: the same product used in a ventilated kitchen and in a windowless internal washroom carries different risk and may need different controls.
- Hold a current safety data sheet for every product in use: suppliers must provide these free
- Complete a COSHH assessment for each hazardous product and each task it is used for
- Record the controls: ventilation, dilution, PPE, contact time, what to do if it goes wrong
- Train every cleaner on the products they use, and record that you did
- Label every decanted container with the product name and hazard information: unlabelled spray bottles are the most common failure found on audit
- Never store chemicals where the public or children can reach them, including in an unlocked vehicle
The single most important rule to train into staff: never mix products. Bleach combined with an acidic descaler releases chlorine gas. This injures cleaners in the UK every year and it happens because two products were used on the same surface minutes apart, not because anyone deliberately mixed them in a bucket.
Risk assessments and RAMS explained
Assess per site, not once for the business. The hazards in a ground-floor office are not the hazards in a warehouse with mezzanine access, a kitchen with hot surfaces, or a care home with vulnerable residents.
Review a site assessment when anything material changes: new chemicals, new equipment, a layout change, or after any incident.
| Score | Rating | Action required |
|---|---|---|
| 1–4 | Low | Monitor; existing controls adequate |
| 5–9 | Medium | Additional controls where reasonably practicable |
| 10–15 | High | Controls required before work proceeds |
| 16–25 | Critical | Do not proceed until risk is reduced |
The hazards that actually injure cleaners
Lone working deserves particular attention because it is so normal in cleaning and so rarely assessed. A cleaner alone in an empty commercial building at 6am has no one to raise the alarm. A documented check-in procedure: a message on arrival and departure, and a named person who notices when one does not arrive: costs nothing and is the control an auditor will look for.
| Hazard | Typical cause | Primary control |
|---|---|---|
| Slips on wet floors | Mopping without signage | Wet floor signs, clean in sections, dry immediately |
| Chemical burns | Wrong dilution, no gloves | Dosing systems, COSHH training, mandatory PPE |
| Respiratory harm | Poor ventilation, mixed products | Ventilation, never mix, correct dilution |
| Falls from height | Standing on chairs and desks | Provide steps, ban improvised access |
| Manual handling | Carrying machines and stock | Trolleys, two-person lifts, training |
| Lone working | Solo cleaning out of hours | Check-in procedure, mobile contact, escalation |
| Needlestick / sharps | Public premises, healthcare | Sharps training, never reach into bins |
The documents commercial clients will ask for
Before awarding a contract, most commercial clients and every facilities management provider will request a compliance pack. Having it ready is a genuine competitive advantage; assembling it in a panic during a tender is not.
- Public liability insurance certificate: usually £2m or £5m
- Employers' liability insurance certificate
- Health and safety policy statement
- Site-specific risk assessments and method statements (RAMS)
- COSHH assessments and safety data sheets for every product in use
- Staff training records, including COSHH and manual handling
- Accident and incident log, and your RIDDOR reporting procedure
- DBS check evidence where relevant to the site
- ICO registration certificate
- Waste carrier registration if you remove waste from site
Keeping it manageable
The reason health and safety documentation decays in cleaning businesses is not laziness. It is that it lives in a folder on one laptop, gets updated when a tender forces it, and is invisible to the people on site who actually need it.
Three practical habits keep it alive. Store assessments where the cleaner working that site can read them from their phone. Log incidents at the time, in one place, with a severity rating: not in a WhatsApp message that disappears. And schedule audits so they happen on a date rather than when someone remembers.
This is what CleanFlo's compliance engine was built to do: site risk assessments on a 5×5 matrix, incident logging by severity, scheduled audits, and a live compliance score visible on the dashboard so a gap is obvious before a client finds it. The important part is not the software though. It is that the documents are current, accessible on site, and someone owns them.