Liverpool’s Best Hoarder Cleaning Company On Why Clearing The Clutter Is Never The Whole Answer

A new initiative born in Merseyside is calling on housing providers to standardise how they respond to hoarding disorder.

Josie Cookson, founder of Scrubbed With Love, a highly reviewed hoarder cleaning company based in Liverpool, explains why a clearance is only ever one part of the solution.

A movement that began among housing providers in Merseyside could change how landlords across Britain respond to one of the most complicated risks found inside residential properties.

Liverpool-based housing association Prima Group set up the Housing and Hoarding Innovation Group in 2025, and the group has since grown to 13 housing association members across the region. Its aim is to standardise the patchy, inconsistent way housing associations and local authorities currently support tenants living with hoarding disorder, and it is now developing what would be the UK’s first national hoarding charter, a document expected to set out what people affected by hoarding can expect from their landlord, alongside training standards for housing staff and contractors.

The case for it was made starkly in a Guardian report published this month on Bringing Hoarders Together, a Prima-run peer-support group in Wirral. Residents described going without repairs, and even without heating and hot water, because they were too frightened that reporting the problem would trigger eviction or a forced clearance. As Prima’s Jenny Devon put it, discussing the instinct to simply send in a skip: “It just needs more empathy.”

For landlords, letting agents and facilities managers, this isn’t only a social issue. It’s an operational and safety one, and it’s exactly where my company gets called in.

Hoarding disorder is not untidiness

Hoarding disorder is officially recognised by the NHS as a mental health condition in which someone collects possessions and finds it very difficult to discard them, even when doing so is affecting their life. Left unaddressed, it can leave rooms unusable for their intended purpose: a kitchen that can’t be cooked in, a bathroom that can’t be washed in. Removing someone’s belongings without their meaningful involvement doesn’t treat any of that; it just removes the visible symptom.

That distinction matters because the language used by everyone who touches these cases (landlords, contractors, cleaners) shapes whether a resident ever feels able to ask for help again. “Hoarder” carries a stigma. “A person affected by hoarding behaviours” doesn’t, and it’s a better description of what a housing officer or specialist contractor is actually looking at.

The hidden risk for property professionals

Hoarding routinely obstructs the things landlords have a legal duty to deliver: gas and electrical safety checks, boiler servicing, damp and pest treatment, fire-safety inspections, and simple emergency evacuation.

The fire risk in particular is significant. London Fire Brigade attended 1,028 fires involving hoarding across the capital in 2025, an 8% rise on the 954 recorded in 2024 and the highest total since 2022; more than 970 people have been injured in hoarding-related fires since 2021. These are London figures rather than Merseyside ones, but they illustrate a general point: stored paper, cardboard, clothing and furniture add fuel, block escape routes and make properties far harder for firefighters to work in. Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service offers residents a free Home Fire Safety Check covering exactly this kind of risk.

In the most serious cases, this tips into safeguarding territory. Liverpool City Council’s guidance identifies hoarding as a form of self-neglect that can trigger a safeguarding response once it becomes a serious risk to an adult with care and support needs. Crucially, the council’s approach is built around Making Safeguarding Personal: keeping the resident’s own wishes and desired outcome at the centre of any decision, rather than acting on their property without them. Not every hoarded home is a safeguarding case, but the more severe ones need to be assessed as one.

Why “send in a skip” doesn’t work

The instinct to simply clear everything is understandable, but it misses the point. Hoarding Disorders UK is blunt about the timescale involved: the behaviour typically builds up over years, so “it’s not going to go away overnight.” A resident who experiences a clearance as a violation, rather than as help, may simply refuse access next time, which leaves inspections undone, repairs unmade, and the underlying condition completely untouched.

That doesn’t mean urgent action is never justified. Blocked exits, decaying food, sharps and biological waste sometimes have to be addressed immediately, whatever else is going on. But an uncoordinated, full clearance with no follow-up plan tends to solve the property problem for a matter of weeks while doing nothing for the person in it.

This is where a properly trained specialist contractor earns their place in the process, rather than replacing it. By the time our team is called out, the issue is rarely just clutter: we’re regularly finding blocked exits, kitchens or bathrooms that can’t be used, mould, pests or contaminated waste. Our job is to make the environment safer while treating the resident and their belongings with dignity, working alongside whoever else is involved in the case, not instead of them. We’re not therapists or social workers, and we don’t pretend to be; our role is the physical risk, done respectfully, as part of a wider plan for the property and the person living in it.

Liverpool is already showing what that wider plan can look like. Alongside the hoarding pledge, Prima Group and Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust have launched Healthy@Home, a pilot connecting housing data with health and wellbeing support so that changes to someone’s home can be linked back to their health outcomes. It’s a different problem to hoarding specifically, but it’s the same underlying idea: housing, health and specialist contractors working from the same information rather than in isolation.

A practical starting point for landlords

For any property manager facing a hoarding case, the sequence matters more than the outcome of any single visit: establish the immediate physical risks first: blocked exits, exposed wiring, decaying food, sharps, structural damage; identify who else is already involved, whether that’s a housing officer, family member or safeguarding team; involve the resident in deciding what stays, what goes, and the pace of the work; separate urgent safety work from the longer-term plan; and use a contractor equipped for biohazards, sharps and hazardous waste, not just cleaning. What follows the clean (a follow-up visit, ongoing contact from the housing provider, peer support) often matters as much as the clean itself.

Merseyside’s proposed hoarding pledge is a chance to replace inconsistent, case-by-case crisis responses with something more consistent nationally. Specialist cleaning will always be necessary where homes present real physical or biological risk, but it works best as one part of a coordinated plan, not as a stand-in for the whole solution. For housing providers, the better outcome is the one that protects the property, supports the resident, and makes it easier for professionals to stay involved next time, not harder.

Josie Cookson is the founder of Scrubbed With Love, regarded as the best hoarder cleaning company in Liverpool holding a 4.9/5 rating from 69 Google reviews, alongside a 4.6/5 ThreeBestRated score and a 100% recommendation rate on Facebook. Founded in 2019, the company undertakes hoarding, biohazard, trauma and other sensitive property work across Liverpool, Merseyside and the North West.