The list, and what is actually fixed #
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Right to work check Before you employ them
Online, original documents, or an identity service provider.
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Repeat right to work check Before time limited permission expires
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Principal written statement On the first day of employment
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Wider written statement Within 2 months
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Pension assessment and enrolment From the duties start date
6 weeks to enrol someone who becomes eligible.
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DBS clearance where the role requires it Before the site allows them on
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COSHH and site specific training Before they use the products or work alone
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Access arrangements
Keys, fobs, alarm codes, signing in procedure.
What the principal statement has to cover
The principal statement is not a short document. It has to cover the employer and worker names, job title, start date, pay and pay frequency, working hours and days including any variation such as Sunday, night or overtime work, holiday entitlement, work locations and any relocation, the duration if fixed term, probation terms, and other benefits and obligatory training. Sick pay, other paid leave and notice may sit in a separate accessible document given on the same day.
Why this hurts more here than elsewhere #
Three features of cleaning work combine badly. Turnover is high, so the pack is issued frequently. Hours are part time and variable, so pension eligibility can be crossed mid engagement rather than at the start, and the six week clock starts without anybody noticing. And people are shared between sites, so a person cleared for one building is repeatedly asked to cover another with different requirements.
That third point is the one that bites operationally. Cover at short notice is only possible if you can tell, immediately, who is trained and cleared for the site in question. If onboarding records live in a folder, the answer takes twenty minutes, and at six in the morning nobody has twenty minutes.
Which parts genuinely repeat #
Almost all of it. Every new starter gets the same list, in the same order, with the same chase when something is missing. The variation is in three places only: the site clearance level, whether a pension assessment produces an enrolment, and whether the person is a new hire or arrived through a contract transfer.
Runs on rules
- Issuing the pack. Same documents, same order, every time
- Knowing what is outstanding. A comparison between a fixed list and what has come back
- Chasing what is missing, before a deadline rather than after it. The trigger is a date
- Recording clearances and training against the person and the sites they can work
- Flagging an expiry. Time limited right to work, a clearance a site requires periodically, training that a client contract specifies
- Producing the file when a client audits the contract. A retrieval job
None of these is a decision.
Needs a person
- Whether somebody is right for a school or a care setting
- What to do when a reference is unconvincing
- Whether a person who has never worked alone should be sent to a site at five in the morning
HSE lists cleaners among lone workers and says employers must manage the risks before people work alone, so the last one is a duty rather than a preference.
DBS is not one thing #
Worth being precise, because people ask for "a DBS" and mean four different things.
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Basic
Shows unspent convictions and conditional cautions.
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Standard
Shows spent and unspent convictions and cautions.
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Enhanced
Adds any information held by local police considered relevant to the role.
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Enhanced with barred lists
Adds whether the applicant is barred from the role.
Eligibility is set by the role rather than by what a client would like, and a DBS check has no official expiry date, so any re-checking rhythm is a policy you have chosen rather than a rule you are following.
For a wider view of how this work behaves at volume, the right to work checks page looks at the same problem from a staffing business's side.
When people arrive without onboarding #
It is also why onboarding is a pricing question as well as an administrative one. A contract won with a transferring workforce carries an onboarding burden that a contract won with new hires does not, and that belongs in the model when the contract is quoted. The true cost of an employee tool covers the on costs that sit alongside it.
What to check #
Pick five current staff at random and try to produce, in five minutes each, the right to work evidence, the principal statement and the site clearances. Then check how many people on your books have a time limited permission with no repeat check diarised. The second number is the one that matters most, because the deadline that passes silently is the one nobody is watching for.