More and more British homes are hiring domestic help to ensure a good work/life balance as a recent survey revealed that some 6 million household in the UK now hire some kind of help for chores about the house.
With many of us experiencing increased working hours brought about as a result of the economic downturn as workers spend more hours in the office in a bid to either stay on the right side of their boss, or deal with an increasing workload because of staff cuts, domestic chores have slipped to the bottom of the pile in the list of priorities.
However, someone’s got to the washing, mow the garden and vacuum the carpet, and increasingly that someone is hired help.
The survey by Churchill Home Insurance found that 6 million of us, which works out as 12% of the homes in the UK, now pay someone to help with domestic chores. The most popular hired service for the home is a cleaner or gardener with 2.5 million homes revealing they have one or the other. The second most common form of hired help as revealed by the study is a handyman to deal with odd jobs about the home, and also someone to do the laundry and ironing, and also a nanny to take care of children.
Although longer working hours and the difficulty of juggling childcare in a family where both parents work were seen as the main contributing factors in why domestic help is on the rise, 24% of those questioned in the survey said they hired a cleaner or handyman simply because they didn’t like doing the dirty work themselves.