TivloYou have just won a contract from a competitor. The facilities manager is pleased, the pricing worked, and you are looking forward to getting started. Then HR sends you a list of twelve names. These are the cleaners currently on site. Under TUPE, you need to take them on.
If you have never dealt with a TUPE transfer before, that email will give you pause. If you have, you know that how you handle the next few weeks determines whether this new contract becomes a solid piece of business or an expensive headache.
What TUPE Actually Means
TUPE stands for the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 2006, amended in 2014. The regulations exist to protect workers when a business or service changes hands.
In commercial cleaning, a TUPE transfer typically happens when you win a contract that a competitor was running. If the contract is sufficiently similar to what the outgoing company was doing, and if the cleaners spent a significant proportion of their time on that contract, those cleaners have the right to transfer to you on their existing terms and conditions.
What transfers: their employment contracts, including pay rates, holiday entitlement, length of service, and most other terms. What does not transfer: the outgoing contractor's pension scheme obligations beyond a basic level, and any enhanced redundancy terms that are contractual rather than policy.
You cannot take someone on at a lower wage just because they are transferring. You cannot change their hours to suit your operational preferences. You take them on as they are, including any accrued service.
Before You Start: Due Diligence
Before you commit to a contract where TUPE is likely to apply, you need information. The outgoing contractor is legally required to provide employee liability information (ELI) at least 28 days before the transfer date. This includes:
- •Names and ages of affected employees
- •Details of their employment contracts
- •Disciplinary and grievance records from the past two years
- •Any claims employees have made against the outgoing contractor in the last two years
Do not skip this step. If the outgoing contractor has staff on enhanced terms, or if there is an active tribunal claim, you need to know before you take the contract on, not after. If the outgoing company fails to provide this information, you can seek compensation, but that takes time and does not undo a bad transfer.
Pay particular attention to hourly rates. If the outgoing company was paying above market for any reason, you absorb that. Build it into your pricing model before you submit the tender.
The Consultation Process
TUPE does not just apply to employment terms. Both you (the incoming contractor) and the outgoing contractor have obligations to inform and consult with affected employees.
In practice, this means:
The outgoing contractor should inform employees that a transfer is happening, give them the name of the incoming employer, and explain what the transfer means for them.
You, as the incoming contractor, are required to provide the outgoing contractor with information about any measures you intend to take post-transfer. If you plan to change working arrangements, you need to say so. You cannot take on staff and then restructure without going through a proper process.
Consultation should be with employee representatives or, if none exist, directly with affected employees. For a site with twelve operatives, you may be holding a brief meeting in a school corridor or a car park before the transfer date. It does not need to be formal, but it needs to happen, and you need to document it.
Common Problems and How to Avoid Them
The staff do not want to transfer. Some employees may not want to move to a new employer, particularly if your company has a different reputation, different management style, or different rotas. You cannot force someone to transfer. An employee who objects is treated as having resigned from their current employment, with no claim against you. What you cannot do is encourage employees to object so you can replace them with cheaper staff. That is a dismissal and is automatically unfair.
The outgoing contractor drags its feet on information. You need ELI to plan properly. If the outgoing contractor is obstructive, document your requests. This becomes relevant if there is a dispute later.
The transfer date slips. Getting the handover date wrong is more common than you would expect. Make sure the contract with the client confirms the date clearly, and build your onboarding plan around it. Operatives need to know exactly who they are employed by and from when.
Legacy issues surface after transfer. If a transferring employee raises a grievance that relates to events before the transfer, that liability comes to you. This is one of the reasons due diligence matters.
Turning a TUPE Transfer into a Positive Start
The companies that handle TUPE transfers well tend to treat them as an opportunity rather than a legal obligation to get through.
The transferring operatives already know the site. They know the client contacts, the cleaning cupboard layout, the quirks of the building. That is genuinely valuable. A new team takes weeks to reach the same operational familiarity.
A brief welcome meeting before the transfer date, clear communication about what stays the same and what changes, and prompt payment on the right rate from day one sets the tone. Most TUPE problems in commercial cleaning start with a lack of communication, not with the regulations themselves.
Keeping Track of What You Inherit
When operatives transfer, their full employment histories come with them. If you are running a growing business across multiple sites, knowing exactly who transferred under TUPE, when, and on what terms is information you will need for wage reviews, holiday calculations, and any future restructure.
Tivlo's Business Portal is designed for exactly this kind of operational record-keeping, giving cleaning businesses a central place to manage site-by-site information without spreadsheets and shared drives. During pre-launch, Tivlo is currently accepting founding partners who will shape how the product develops.
If you want to understand how your operational processes measure up, the Tivlo Cleaning Business Scorecard assesses ten areas of your business and gives you a personalised report. It takes about five minutes.
Take the scorecard at score.tivlo.app, or join the waitlist to be first to access Tivlo at launch.