CrestClean believes recent changes to the New Zealand Government’s Rules of Procurement have been positive for the cleaning industry in New Zealand. In a press statement (19th August 2014), the company said, ‘While the Building Service Contractors New Zealand (BSCNZ) are upset that their stranglehold over government contracts has been replaced by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment’s Principles of Government Procurement, CrestClean welcomes the move.
‘A key element of the new rules, announced by Labour Minister Simon Bridges in May 2014, was to ‘ensure that all potential suppliers of cleaning services operate on a fair and level playing field’.
‘CrestClean supports the ability for all companies to be treated equally, as the original Principles Agreement which contained a membership requirement essentially locked out some New Zealand companies from tendering for government contracts.
‘When the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment undertook a consultation with key stakeholders for the property services industry, CrestClean along with the Franchise Association of New Zealand, the Employers and Manufacturers Association (EMA) and other companies all expressed concern about a membership requirement.
‘The Government was told that with over 2,000 cleaning companies and over 4,000 self-employed cleaning businesses in New Zealand, the BSCNZ – which represented approximately 50 of them, effectively meant a significant proportion of the total number of cleaning suppliers were excluded from this agreement.
‘Business New Zealand stated that the Government should remove the requirement that suppliers to government be members of the BSCNZ. Overall, there was wide support for the Government’s move.
‘CrestClean believed that government agencies were missing out on receiving tenders from companies that had invested in training and the up-skilling of cleaners’, stated the release. ‘Not surprisingly, CrestClean wanted to ensure that it had an opportunity to tender for contracts and not be excluded because it wasn’t a member of the BSCNZ,’ stated the press release.
The company has made no secret of the fact that it believes the level of formal training in the cleaning industry needs to improve. That was a core reason, according to CrestClean, why it established the Master Cleaners Training Institute, a member of the British Institute of Cleaning Science.
With only about one to two percent of employees in the cleaning industry getting any formal training, CrestClean believes the company has gained a competitive advantage by putting all our cleaners through formal training courses. “We continue to be disappointed the industry association does not seem to focus effort on lifting the skills of cleaners that some would describe as vulnerable workers,” stated Grant McLauchlen, CrestClean managing director.
“CrestClean is proud of turning a lowly thought of, low paid, high staff turnover industry into a career path, enabling honest and hard-working people to get ahead,” he continued. “We certainly don’t shy away from, and will continue to proactively engage with regulators and the government on policy issues that impact the industry.”