ECJ EUROPEAN Cleaning Journal

The Professional Association of Cleaning Companies (ASPEL) in Spain has demanded that current legislation in the awarding of public contracts be modified to establish a minimum price for tenders. This, it says, will prevent illegal practices on the part of companies that are insufficiently prepared for service provision.

ASPEL commissioned a report by Deloitte entitled 'The Tyranny of Price', which was presented at the Confederation of Spanish Businesses CEOE) by its president Juan Díez de los Ríos and Deloitte's Ignacio Ramírez Vera recently.

CEOE president Juan Rossell pointed out that price is not everything when awarding contracts for this type of service and he cautioned that, if it were, "quality may deteriorate, particularly in a sector such as this in which the greater part of the expense is labour costs".

Díez de los Ríos stressed that consideration of price as sole evaluation criterion in awarding contracts leads to "inefficiency of the service and the use of resources in an improper manner".

He continued: "No one considers the cost of not doing enough cleaning, or of cleaning to an insufficient standard. The purchase of cleaning services is a profitable investment in terms of the maintenance of assets, creating value and making the spaces which we clean sustainable."

Ramírez Vera reviewed some of the failings of the current legislation in matters of contracting, such as permissiveness when determining tender prices or abnormally low tenders "which, in recent years, have given rise to awarding by reverse auction".

"The Tyranny of Price' was drawn up to highlight the effects on cleaning companies of considering price as the sole or dominant criterion for awarding contracts, both by public administrations and by the private sector. It points out that in practice, the formal procedures of tender competitions end up by becoming covert auctions, employing the lowest-priced tender as sole criterion for selection.

For that reason the cleaning companies are requesting a minimum starting price be determined that covers labour costs. They are also demanding that regulations be strengthened to exclude from public tender competition those companies whose prices do not cover labour costs together with the other costs required for the provision of the service, such as consumables.

Spain's professional cleaning sector comprises over 16,500 companies and employs 330,000 people.