The Chartered Environmental Cleaning Review is the only cleaning review in the UK delivered by a Chartered Environmental Cleaner. In a single site visit, we give you an independent, evidence-based picture of your current cleaning provision — measured against NHS standards and BICSc criteria — and identify exactly where your guaranteed 10% saving is.

No inspection framework in the UK directly audits cleaning standards. ISI doesn't. Ofsted doesn't. CQC doesn't. Contractors self-report. That gap is where standards quietly slip — and where budget quietly follows. The Review closes it.

The Review is fully standalone. Many clients use it to benchmark their current provider, prepare ahead of an inspection, or build the evidence needed for a contract retender.

With a large FM contractor, you get an account manager and an operative. With NRF, you get a Chartered Environmental Cleaner who understands your setting, your compliance obligations, and what a properly specified cleaning contract actually looks like.

Most contracts are won on price and measured on appearance. The methods, equipment and products haven't changed in years. Nobody on the client side has the expertise to ask why — and the contractor has no incentive to volunteer it. That's the gap NRF was built to close.

Richard Felton C.Env.Cln. oversees every NRF contract personally. Structured programmes. Modern methods and technology where they add value. Accountable delivery. A direct line to the person responsible. And a guaranteed 10% saving built in from day one.

Safer Space is an independent accreditation standard that addresses one of the most significant gaps in public health — the difference between environments that look clean and environments that are genuinely safe. Visually clean surfaces can still harbour resistant pathogens. The Safer Space standard was developed specifically in response to the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance, and NRF is one of its founding certified providers in the UK.

Most organisations are paying for clean. Safer Space accreditation — and NRF's programme to achieve it — delivers something meaningfully different: independent, evidenced proof that your setting is safe.

VAT on school fees has changed the financial landscape for independent schools overnight. Every line of the budget is under scrutiny — and governors, parents and bursars are all asking the same question: where can we find savings without compromising the school's offer?

Cleaning is one of the few areas where a significant, guaranteed saving is genuinely available — without touching standards. Most school cleaning contracts are specified on price and never independently reviewed. The methods, equipment and products being used are often the same ones that were in place five or ten years ago. That gap between what's possible and what's being delivered is where NRF operates.

ISI inspections explicitly state they do not constitute an exhaustive health and safety audit — and there is no framework within ISI's scope to assess whether a school's cleaning provision meets any defined standard. Your contractor self-reports. Nobody independently checks.

A school can pass ISI inspection and still be operating with hygiene standards that would fail an NHS audit. In a sector where parents are paying significant fees and making decisions based on trust, that is a risk worth taking seriously — and one that a single Review can resolve.

The Review tells you where the saving is. What happens next depends entirely on what suits your school. NRF can work with you in whatever way makes sense.

Education settings spend significant sums on cleaning contracts. Few have any independent means of knowing whether those contracts are performing. The link between environmental hygiene and attendance is well established — poorly maintained settings drive up absence, impact attainment and erode confidence in the setting. NRF gives education providers the evidence, the guaranteed saving, and the means to act on both.

MATs are increasingly run with the rigour and scrutiny of a business — with CEOs, COOs and finance directors accountable for performance across every function. Cleaning is often the last area to be professionalised. Most trusts are managing contracts setting by setting, with no central standard, no independent oversight and no consistent evidence of what they're actually getting for their money.

NRF can bring consistency across your trust — a single evidenced standard, applied to every setting, with a guaranteed saving identified at each one. That's the kind of data-led, professionally managed approach that belongs in a modern MAT.

CQC Regulation 15, the NHS National Standards of Healthcare Cleanliness 2025, and the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance have fundamentally changed what healthcare cleaning needs to be. Risk-based, auditable, and visible — not just scheduled.

Most healthcare settings are cleaned by contractors operating to a general commercial standard. That is not the same as a clinical standard. The gap between the two is where infection risk quietly accumulates — in FR2 consulting rooms cleaned to an FR4 specification, in colour coding protocols that exist on paper but not in practice, in Commitment to Cleanliness Charters displayed but not evidenced.

NRF aligns product type and frequency to Functional Risk classification — the approach the 2025 standards call for and most contractors have never implemented. For GP practices that means FR2, FR4, and FR6 treated as the distinct clinical environments they are.

Most commercial cleaning contracts are specified on price and measured on appearance. Neither tells you whether your environment is actually reducing the risk of infection, cutting sickness absence, or protecting your people's productivity.

Sickness absence costs UK employers an estimated £28 billion annually. A significant proportion is preventable through better environmental hygiene — but only if the cleaning provision is structured around infection control, not just a mop schedule.

NRF brings the same practitioner-led, NHS-benchmarked approach to office environments that we apply in clinical settings. The result is environments that protect productivity, reduce absence, and give facilities managers independent evidence that their cleaning is actually working.

NRF Solutions Limited
Registered in England & Wales
Company No: 16260290

nrfsolutions.co.uk