I don't know whether this helps anyone or not, but I'm trying to develop a product for contract cleaning (having spent years trying to buy it) and in support of my research had to find out the UK market size for cleaning. The British Business Library has market reports compiled by Mint (formerly Mintel) and Keynote and they largely agreed on the following figures which are based on, as mentioned in another post, SIC codes.
The commercial cleaning industry is reported as being worth about £6.5bn annually - interestingly, when I last did this exercise back in 2003 (when I thought you had to know this kind of thing to start a cleaning company) the figure was in excess of £9.5bn and one of the reports I read stated that the reason for the seeming drop in revenue is explained by the fact that many companies now tend to establish themselves as soft service providers and incorporate cleaning activities into a wider range of services including gardening, reactive maintenance and so on.
The figures, of course, don't include sole traders and partnerships but that kind of balances out that a huge proportion of the stated industry turnover will be heading towards the large companies who dominate the industry.
Right, I'll go and do the post I came on to do now..
Quick edit - to give some context, I also had to look up domiciliary care(home care as opposed to care homes) at the BBL. Thats a fairly easy figure for market researchers to get since care agencies have to be registered. 65 000 companies are registered in the UK and the total turnover is £3.5bn.
