Cleaning Windows Above the Ground Floor

The flat is on the tenth floor, the glass looks grey, and the question is whether a domestic cleaner will do the outside of it while they are already there. The answer is no, and the reasons explain who to ask instead.

In a tower, the outside of the glass is the building’s job

Rope access or a cradle, not a cleaner with a cloth

In a modern block around Canary Wharf, the Isle of Dogs or Royal Docks, the exterior facade is cleaned either by rope access technicians working down the face on ropes, or from a building maintenance unit, the powered cradle that lives on the roof and runs on rails. Both need anchor points designed into the structure, trained operatives and specific insurance.

Height is what puts it there. Lower down, exterior glass is ordinary window cleaning work: a water fed pole from the pavement, or a ladder, which HSE says has traditionally done domestic ground, first and second floor windows. It is still a window cleaner’s trade rather than a domestic cleaner’s, and in a managed block the lease may still put the job with the building rather than with you. What changes with height is that no version of it can be done from inside your flat.

Who arranges it, and who pays for it

How that work is arranged and paid for is set out in your lease, and the government’s own guidance for leaseholders says the same: the lease is where the organisation of the service charge is fixed, and what can be charged to it. Typically the managing agent or the residents’ management company holds the contract, sets the schedule, and recovers the cost through the service charge that pays for communal cleaning and maintenance. It is not something a resident buys separately, and it is not something a resident can bring forward by hiring a domestic cleaner. If the glass has been grey for a long time, the useful move is to ask the agent when the facade contractor was last on site and when they are next booked.

Work at height, not housework

There is no height at which it stops counting

The Work at Height Regulations 2005 sit behind all of this. The test, in HSE’s plain-language version and in the wording of Regulation 2 alike, is whether a person could fall far enough to be injured if nothing were done to prevent it. Where they are standing does not come into it: the statute covers any place, and spells out that this includes places at or below ground level. Nothing in the definition names a minimum height, which surprises people who assume there is a floor level below which it stops counting.

Avoid the height before you try to control it

Regulation 6 sets a hierarchy, and the sequence is the point. First, do not work at height at all where the job can reasonably be done safely otherwise than at height. HSE gives the two examples that matter for glass: a telescopic water fed pole, and cleaning from inside. Where the height cannot be avoided, work from a place that is already safe, such as inside the window or from a balcony. Only after that does access equipment come into it, and a cradle or a set of ropes sits at that end of the list rather than the top of it. They are work at height, not an alternative to it.

The duty falls on employers and on those who control the work, which HSE illustrates with facilities managers and building owners who contract others to work at height. That takes in a cleaning company, an agency and a self-employed cleaner.

The one gap, and why it does not help you

If you employ a cleaner directly as a domestic servant in your own household, section 51 of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 puts that relationship outside the Act, and the Work at Height Regulations sit under the Act. HSE says the same thing in plainer words, and adds that a cleaner hired through an agency or working self-employed is not a domestic servant and is covered. So the gap is real and it is narrow.

It also changes less than it sounds. You are still the occupier, and section 2 of the Occupiers’ Liability Act 1957 gives you a common duty of care to take reasonable care that a visitor is reasonably safe on your premises. Asking someone to lean out of an eighth floor window is not that. Permission was never the thing that made the job safe, so removing a regulation does not make it safer. Whether the fallout would be an HSE matter or a claim in negligence, the thing to settle first is who carries the insurance and the employment duties.

Why the numbers are blunt about this

Falls are still the most common way people die at work

Over the long term, HSE reports that the rate of fatal injury to workers has shown a downward trend, though the rate of decline has slowed in recent years. Non-fatal injuries tell the same story more quietly. Of the employee injuries that employers reported through RIDDOR in 2024/25, falls from height made up 8%, and HSE’s view is that employers report only around half of non-fatal employee injuries in the first place.

Ladders are not banned. The drop is the problem

Worth saying clearly, because it is a common misreading: no health and safety law bans a ladder or a stepladder. HSE’s position is that for a short, low risk job a ladder can be a sensible choice, with the caveat that it should not be the default one. A ladder in your hallway is fine. A ladder or a sill at fourth floor level next to an open window is not a low risk short duration task, and calling it one does not make it one.

Tilt-turn glass, and the windows that defeat you

Which side of this you are on is decided by the window, not by the cleaner.

Your lease has an opinion too

Before anyone decides to try, check the paperwork. Many leases and building rules in managed blocks prohibit leaning out of windows, attaching anything to frames or the facade, and placing items on external sills, so read your own rather than assume yours is silent. Window restrictors are commonly fitted for the same reason and are not there to be defeated.

There is a practical reason as well as a legal one. Anything dropped from a tower lands on a podium, a walkway or a pavement below. Blocks take this seriously because they have to.

What we will not do, and what we do instead

The inside face is not a consolation prize

What we do is the inside face of the glass, the frames, the tracks and the sills. Most of what makes a window look dirty from inside a room is on your side of it: kitchen film, hand marks around handles, dried condensation runs, and the grit that collects in the bottom track and grinds the seal. Clearing the track also stops the drainage holes blocking, which is what turns condensation into a puddle on the sill.

The order to do it in

Order matters, because grit travels.

In hard water areas that final pass is where spotting shows, which is covered in our guide to limescale in London’s hard water.

The honest summary is short. The inside is ours. Up a tower the outside is the building’s, and lower down it belongs to a window cleaner with a pole. Anyone offering to bridge that gap from your living room is selling you a risk you did not ask to buy.