Sustainability in Commercial Cleaning: What London’s Asset and Property Managers Need to Know in 2026

Author: Mariana Gonçalves  ·  Published April 2026  ·  Reading time: 10 minutes

Three years ago, asking your cleaning contractor about their carbon footprint would have seemed unusual. Today, it is a standard item on the procurement checklist of every institutional property owner and managing agent in London. The sustainability expectations placed on the real estate supply chain have shifted fundamentally and cleaning, as the largest facilities management workforce in most commercial properties, sits squarely within scope.

This shift is being driven by a confluence of regulatory change, investor pressure and occupier demand that is not going to reverse. Disclosure requirements and sustainability and net zero commitments made by the majority of major institutional landlords all place downstream supply chain accountability, including cleaning contracts, under increasing scrutiny. And yet the majority of cleaning contracts currently in place across London’s commercial estate make no meaningful reference to sustainability at all.

This guide is written for the asset managers, property managers and facilities professionals who are responsible for closing that gap. It explains what sustainability-embedded cleaning actually means in practice, what your contractor should be able to provide, and how to identify whether your current provision is genuinely sustainable or simply claiming to be.

The regulatory backdrop: why this can no longer be deferred

The regulatory environment around ESG disclosure for real estate has changed significantly in the past two years. In the UK, the introduction of the Sustainability Disclosure Requirements (SDR) from 2024, alongside the development of ISSB-aligned Sustainability Reporting Standards (UK SRS), has raised expectations around the transparency, consistency and evidencing of sustainability claims and climate risk assessments, while the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) is driving more detailed, assured reporting across many market participants. Alongside formal regulation, industry benchmarks such as GRESB continue to push asset managers toward increasingly granular, comparable data on operational and supply chain performance, reflecting growing investor scrutiny. At the same time, emerging frameworks such as the Taskforce on Inequality and Social-related Financial Disclosures (TISFD) signal a further broadening of disclosure expectations beyond traditional environmental metrics into wider social impacts. These developments point clearly toward more rigorous, standardised and financially material sustainability disclosure across real estate portfolios.

For real estate portfolios, this means being able to account for sustainability performance not just at the asset level but across the supply chain. Cleaning contracts, as a material operational cost and a significant employer within facilities management, are directly implicated.

And at the occupier level, the shift is equally pronounced. The major professional services firms, financial institutions and technology companies that occupy London’s premium commercial space have made public sustainability and net zero carbon commitments. Many are now beginning to ask their landlords and, by extension, their landlords’ service providers, to provide data that supports those commitments. A cleaning contractor who cannot supply ESG data is, increasingly, a contractor who creates a gap in your sustainability story.

ESG reporting requirements are moving downstream faster than most landlords’ cleaning contracts are being updated. The gap between what investors and occupiers require and what most cleaning contracts currently provide is a significant operational ESG risk in commercial real estate.

Where cleaning sits in your ESG framework

Understanding where your cleaning contract sits within your ESG framework is the starting point for addressing it. The answer is: everywhere.

Environmental: carbon emissions

Cleaning operations can contribute to a building’s carbon emissions across all scopes, directly or indirectly:

• Scope 1: cleaning activities may drive additional direct emissions where they extend the operation of on-site systems, for example, by requiring gas boilers to run out-of-hours, or through the use of fuel-powered cleaning equipment.
• Scope 2: cleaning typically increases electricity consumption within a building through the use of electric machinery on-site and lighting.
• Scope 3: the most significant impact is generally from this scope, which includes supply chain emissions across multiple categories, such as cleaning teams commuting, the generation of waste and the transportation of consumables and cleaning products. In a large commercial estate, these emissions are not trivial, and they are currently invisible in most landlords’ carbon accounts.

An ESG-embedded cleaning contractor should be actively transitioning to electric equipment, low-carbon consumables and reduced-waste operations. And they should be reporting progress against targets on a schedule that aligns with your own sustainability reporting cycle. They should be able to provide the carbon emissions figures associated with the cleaning operations at your site.

Environmental: waste and water

Cleaning operations have a direct impact on waste generation and water consumption at your building. In most cases, cleaning providers play a central role in managing waste streams: overseeing refuse collection processes and ensuring that occupiers are correctly segregating waste in line with site requirements. In some instances, they may also coordinate directly with waste carriers on behalf of the building. This makes the quality of on-the-ground training critical: operatives handling waste day-to-day need to understand not just how waste is segregated, but why it matters, so they can effectively guide and influence occupier behaviour.

Equally, contractors without defined water reduction protocols are likely consuming more of an increasingly constrained resource than necessary. These are not marginal issues: they are measurable, manageable and increasingly reportable.

Social: workforce standards

The social dimension of ESG is where the cleaning sector has historically been most vulnerable to scrutiny and where the best contractors have the greatest opportunity to differentiate. The cleaning workforce in London is predominantly made up of people on lower wages, in shift-based roles, with limited career progression and with few of the benefits that knowledge workers take for granted. A contractor who addresses this proactively through living wage commitments, investment in training and development, financial wellbeing support and genuine career progression pathways is demonstrating a quality of ESG commitment that goes well beyond the environmental checklist.

For asset managers under investor pressure to demonstrate social value in their portfolios, the social sustainability performance of a cleaning contractor is not a peripheral matter. It is a direct contributor to the social value narrative of the estate.

Social: inclusive employment and access to work

Beyond baseline workforce standards, the most progressive cleaning contractors are using their scale to widen access to employment for underrepresented groups, including care leavers, individuals with autism and people with disabilities. In a sector characterised by high turnover and limited entry requirements, there is a clear opportunity to create structured pathways into meaningful, stable work for those who are often excluded from the labour market.

When done well, employability programmes are a marker of operational maturity. Contractors that invest in tailored onboarding, specialist training and ongoing support are better able to retain staff, improve service consistency and build more resilient teams. They also bring a depth of social impact that is both tangible and measurable, whether through sustained employment outcomes, skills development or reduced reliance on public services.

For asset managers facing increasing scrutiny around social value and inclusive growth, these programmes represent a highly visible and credible lever. A cleaning contract that actively supports access to employment for disadvantaged groups strengthens the social narrative of the asset in a way that is immediate, local and demonstrable to investors and occupiers.

Social: community engagement and charitable impact

Leading cleaning contractors are increasingly playing a visible role in supporting the communities in which they operate. Through structured charitable initiatives, volunteering programmes and partnerships with local organisations, contractors are able to extend their impact beyond the building itself and into the wider social fabric of the areas they serve. This can include everything from fundraising and pro bono cleaning services for community spaces, to supporting homelessness charities and youth programmes. It should always be based on local needs: initiatives should be targeted to address the needs and deprivation of the local community, not simply chosen at random.

At its best, this kind of community engagement is embedded in the operating model rather than treated as an add-on. Contractors that actively encourage employee participation, through paid volunteering days or community partnerships, tend to see stronger engagement from their workforce and a clearer alignment between social purpose and day-to-day operations. It also provides a more tangible and human expression of ESG commitments, translating high-level social value ambitions into visible, localised outcomes.

For asset managers, this matters. As expectations around social value continue to rise, particularly in urban markets like London, the ability to demonstrate meaningful community impact is becoming an increasingly important differentiator. Cleaning contractors are uniquely well-positioned to deliver this at scale, given the size and local presence of their teams. A contract that supports charitable activity and community engagement reinforces the social licence to operate and strengthens the overall sustainability narrative of the property.

Governance: transparency and accountability

The governance dimension is the one most often overlooked in cleaning procurement. Governance, in this context, means the systems and processes that make ESG commitments credible: independent auditing, supply chain due diligence, modern slavery compliance, data quality assurance and transparent reporting. A contractor who makes bold sustainability claims without the governance infrastructure to support them is a liability, not an asset, to your ESG story.

What sustainability-embedded cleaning looks like in practice

JPC by Samsic has been building ESG capability into its service delivery for several years. Here is what it looks like in a real estate context.

Low-carbon consumables and equipment

JPC operates an active programme of transitioning cleaning consumables to more sustainable, low-carbon and recycled alternatives, in partnership with suppliers who can provide verifiable sustainability data for their products. On the equipment side, JPC has invested significantly in electric and battery-powered cleaning machines — floor scrubbers, polishers, vacuums and pressure washers — thereby reducing the diesel and petrol consumption that characterises older cleaning fleets. When selecting new equipment, carbon emissions are one of the key metrics taken into account.

Sustainability Managers

JPC deploys dedicated Sustainability Managers who work directly with on-site teams to develop and implement tailored, site-level sustainability plans. These professionals act as the bridge between JPC’s wider sustainability strategy and day-to-day building operations, collaborating closely with site teams to identify opportunities, set priorities and drive continuous improvement.

Sustainability Managers provide support to site teams, who are responsible for coordinating initiatives such as waste segregation compliance, resource and consumables tracking and occupier engagement programmes. They play a key role in shaping and delivering each site’s sustainability roadmap, ensuring it reflects the specific needs and context of the building.

Social value programmes

JPC’s social value commitments are embedded in every contract. All JPC staff are paid at or above the Real Living Wage, a commitment the company has maintained since 2019. The NextGen management development pathway provides a structured route from frontline operative to supervisory and management roles, a programme that has produced a significant proportion of JPC’s current management team. Wagestream financial wellbeing support is available to all employees. And JPC’s Give Back programme — staff-led volunteering and community engagement initiatives — generates measurable social value hours that can be reported as part of the social value contribution of the cleaning contract to your estate.

The reporting challenge and how to solve it

The most common barrier to sustainability-embedded cleaning is not the willingness of landlords to require it, it is the ability of contractors to consistently deliver and report on their sustainability promises. Most cleaning companies do not have the systems to collect, process and report ESG data at the level of granularity that institutional reporting now requires. Sustainability initiatives are often ad hoc and reactive.

By creating a site-level cleaning sustainability strategy, and ensuring that implementation is regularly monitored, we can provide qualitative information and quantitative data to demonstrate the social and environmental impact of our cleaning services at a property. But for property managers evaluating the ESG capability of any cleaning contractor, the right question to ask is: show me a sample ESG report from a comparable site. If the contractor cannot produce one, they do not have the capability to provide what you will shortly be required to report.

Six questions that reveal whether your contractor is genuinely sustainability-enabled

These questions distinguish between contractors who have sustainability-aligned aspirations and those who have sustainability-operational reality.

• Can you provide a sample framework for improving the sustainability of cleaning operations at the contract level?
• Do you pay all staff the Real Living Wage and can you verify this in your payroll data?
• Can you provide your company’s carbon footprint data?
• What proportion of your cleaning equipment fleet is electric or battery-powered?
• What does a sample sustainability report from a comparable site look like?
• How do you ensure your ESG data is independently verifiable?

A contractor who can answer all six with specificity, evidence and without hesitation is a contractor who has built sustainability into their operations rather than their marketing.

The cleaning sector has a greenwashing problem. Many contractors have added ESG language to their proposals without adding ESG capability to their operations. The questions above are designed to separate the two.

What to include in your cleaning specification to drive sustainability performance

Sustainability performance needs to be specified, not assumed. Here is what a well-written sustainability specification for a London commercial building should include:

• Carbon reporting obligation: the contractor must provide GHG Protocol-aligned emissions data for their operations, which count towards your Scope 3 emissions reporting
• Equipment standards: a minimum percentage of the equipment fleet must be electric or battery-powered (specify the percentage, e.g. 80% by year one)
• Consumables: all cleaning consumables must have verifiable environmental, social and governance credentials
• Waste: 100% waste diversion rate from landfill and relevant waste streams implemented, with monthly data provided
• Living wage: all staff must be paid at or above the Real Living Wage, with annual verification
• Training: minimum annual training hours per operative in sustainability operations
• Social value reporting: quarterly reporting of community engagement, employability programmes, charity support and volunteering hours, including feedback about the initiatives that have taken place
• ESG audit: annual audit of ESG performance against contract obligations

The competitive advantage of getting this right

For the asset managers and property directors reading this, there is a compelling commercial reason to address this beyond regulatory compliance. The buildings that can demonstrate genuine, evidence-based, supply-chain-level sustainability credentials are increasingly preferred by the occupiers who matter most. The major financial institutions, professional services firms, and technology companies that anchor premium London commercial buildings are applying their own ESG procurement standards to their real estate decisions. A building that can point to a fully sustainability-embedded operation including its cleaning contractor, has a genuine competitive advantage in the occupier market.

The cost of building that advantage is, in most cases, not significant. The right cleaning contractor does not cost dramatically more than the wrong one. The difference is in what you specify, what you measure and who you choose.

To learn more about JPC by Samsic’s sustainability programme or discuss your building’s sustainability requirements, visit jpcbysamsic.uk/esg or contact our team at jpcbysamsic.uk/talk-to-us.

JPC by Samsic’s Sustainability team would be delighted to walk you through our sustainability strategy and discuss how we can contribute to your building’s sustainability commitments.

Speak to us at jpcbysamsic.uk/talk-to-us