What is hard services?
Hard services are the facilities services relating to the building fabric and its systems — heating, ventilation, electrical, plumbing, lifts and structure — as distinct from soft services delivered to occupants.
The split is a contracting convention rather than a technical one, but it maps onto something real: hard services are where statutory compliance and asset management live, and soft services are where the occupant experience does.
Hard services carry the qualifications. The competence requirements, certificates and duty holder obligations concentrate here, which is why they are usually contracted differently from soft services.
Bundling the two under one provider is common and has obvious coordination advantages; the risk is that hard services compliance gets managed with the attention appropriate to a cleaning contract.
In practice
A contract split between two suppliers at the ceiling line.
Hard services maintain the air handling unit. Soft services clean the office it serves. The grilles are dirty and belong to neither.
Boundaries between service lines are where things live that nobody is contracted for, and they are invisible until somebody complains about the symptom.
The interfaces are worth writing down at mobilisation, when nobody cares, rather than at the first complaint.
What goes wrong in practice
- A bundled contract where hard services compliance is reported at the same level of detail as soft services.
- Statutory obligations assumed to sit with the provider because the services do.
- Scope gaps at the boundary between the two, where each provider assumes the other holds it.