ABCD Ready for the Cleaning Show 2018

Why We Will be at The Cleaning Show
Patricia Wherton, Executive General Secretary

Local Authority and supplier members of the ABCD will be at the Manchester Cleaning Show on April 11th and 12th and you can come and meet us on the British Cleaning Council stand.

We’re taking advantage of the show to present our Cleaning Team of the Year Award, sponsored for the second year by Denis Rawlins Ltd, one of our supplier members. We’ve had some excellent entries to the competition, which was won last year by Rochdale Council for their innovative ways of dealing with increased business at the splendid Victorian Town Hall in the town.

The Cleaning Show this year also gives us the opportunity to have our Annual General Meeting at lunch time on April 12th, and to combine it with a visit to the exhibition so that members can come along and meet their current suppliers, and possibly some new ones as well.
The ABCD was established in 1989 in direct response to the introduction of Compulsive Competitive Tendering. How many readers are old enough and have been around long enough to remember that?

For the first time, local authorities had competition from the private sector in bidding to provide the cleaning services within their Council boundaries, and for local authority managers, this was a new and untested challenge which brought them together in deciding how to deal with it. Hence the ABCD was born.

In the almost thirty years since then, many more challenges have faced local authority cleaning services, and more recently these have come from several years for austerity measures following the 2008 financial crisis when many Councils contracted their services out in cost saving exercises as a strategy to deal with the squeeze on public spending. Also, the introduction of Academy status for schools, which has resulted in many deciding to either contract out or employ their own cleaning staff, and not use the services of the Councils any more has had an impact.

And yet the ABCD goes on. There are still enough local councils who have retained the business of cleaning to ensure that peer support for managers and provided through the ABCD remains an important feature, and enough suppliers who recognise that this inroad to direct service providers is a valuable relationship to have. We’re very grateful for their contribution.
So come along and meet us on April 11th and 12th in Manchester on the British Cleaning Council Stand.