Imperial to directly employ 1,000 services workers

Facilities and catering workers at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust are set for a substantial pay rise and better pensions as they are brought in-house.

Following a review of options for the future management of ‘hotel services’ across the trust’s five hospitals, the move will help ensure services staff are able to play their full and fair role within care teams and enable the trust to improve service quality collaboratively.

The staff, who provide ‘hotel services’, will manage the workers directly when the current outsourcing contract runs out on 31 March. However, the trust said it would monitor the changes for a year and could re-tender the services contract, with better conditions for workers, in 2021.

Of the 1,000 outsourced workers, roughly 200 of them began a series of strikes and demonstrations in October. The striking staff, all of whom are migrants, are employed by Sodexo at St Mary’s hospital in Paddington and have been demanding parity in pay and working conditions with NHS-employed staff at the trust. Many are paid the minimum wage hourly rate of £8.21, with those under 25 being paid £7.70 or just £6.15 an hour according to age.

By November, half of the hotel services staff had moved to London Living Wage rates (£10.55 per hour) with the remainder already on improved terms and conditions as they had been TUPE transferred on NHS terms. All pay for the workers would now be harmonised at £11.28 (including high cost area supplement) from 1 April. All staff will now be eligible for paid sick leave from the first day of absence.

Tim Orchard, Imperial College Healthcare chief executive, said: “We went into the hotel services contract re-tendering process knowing we wanted significant improvements in quality and for our cleaners, porters and catering staff to feel properly valued and part of our wider team. We thought we could achieve that through a new contract but it became apparent that our amended specification was not enough. We have looked at different models for managing hotel services, all with successful examples. We now have an opportunity to make a real step change – for our patients and our staff – that best suits our circumstances.

“These changes will create additional cost pressures next year but we are confident that there are also benefits to unlock, arising from better team working, more co-ordinated planning and improved quality. The pace of change will be challenging but I am confident we will achieve our first test of better team working to meet the 1 April 2020 timescale. To help us manage the transition, we have appointed Retearn, a specialist company with a strong track-record in supporting organisations temporarily to ‘insource’ as well as ‘outsource’ facilities management. I’m very grateful to the wide range of trust staff who have worked incredibly hard to get to this point; to our hotel services staff and their trade union representatives for contributing to the review and sharing their expertise; and to all our staff who I know will want to play their full part in helping to implement these changes and realising the benefits for patients and for colleagues.”