Angels Housekeeping

The idea for the Angels Housekeeping Community Interest Company, a social enterprise and the first of its type in the city, came from Gill Coupland, manager of South Leeds Live at Home scheme and Julie Hanlon and Sarah Thompson who run a small private cleaning business called Dust Angels.

How tickled are we to be Leeds' first Community Interest Company?

Gill explains why they decided to set up:

“When Keeping House began the three of us knew there would be a huge gap in the market for basic care services for the elderly such as cleaning and shopping. We also knew how important these services were to older people who wanted to remain living independently in their own homes.

“We all liked the concept of developing a business model that would allow any profits to go back into the community and specifically for the benefit of elderly people. Julie and Sarah were already running a small cleaning business and were really keen to develop a social business. The three of us are very well-known and trusted in the community so establishing a network of clients has been relatively easy.

“Currently we have 300 clients who pay us by the hour to either clean, shop or both” says Sarah.

“We are very keen to provide an affordable service to elderly people and our charging structure reflects this by giving a discounted rate to people over 60 as part of Keeping House. The full paying customers, who are mostly young professionals and families, make up the rest. Our success depends on getting the right balance between the two different types of customer. Our links with the social work teams in South Leeds have been great. We’re now keen to get our message across to more people that we’ve got spare capacity and can start work straight away.”

Julie added: “The support we’ve had from Keeping House has been tremendous. They put us in touch with Social Business Consulting who have helped access support from West Yorkshire Community Accounting Service (WYCAS) and Social Enterprise Link, worked with us on our business plan and given us general advice on establishing this type of operation. We were also very lucky to be assisted in setting up the company by Stacey Churchward from Fox Hayes Solicitors who worked on the documentation over a weekend so that we could register our company in time to start trading the following week.”

Angels Housekeeping can be contacted on 0113 277 2222 or via email