Spot on Cleaners, a company based on the Hills Meadow industrial estate in Douglas, is offering to help fill the void left by cuts to the government’s home cleaning services.

The cut to the service, announced in December, saw former Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) Minister Kate Beecroft’s company Manx Home Care lose its contract to provide home cleaning services to 122 Manx residents.

The £140,000-a-year saving was made in an attempt to cut the DHSC’s expenditure, which had seen it require more than £20 million extra funding from Tynwald in the past two years.

However, last week, an offer was made on social media on behalf of Spot on Cleaners to provide a combined five hours’ free cleaning a week to those who need assistance to remain in their own homes. Since then the post has had nearly 200 likes, 30 comments and been shared more than 35 times.

It is something of which operations director Victor Moitas and his wife and the company’s operations manager Claudia plus managing director Keith Charnley are very proud, saying: ’We weren’t expecting the response.’

Just before Christmas 2017, Victor decided the time was right to ’help the community’ in which he and his family have made their home.

The couple moved to the island from Portugal and say this is the best place in which they have lived, providing everything they need and the safety to raise their family believing the community spirit is the ’backbone’ of island life.

Mr Charnley, who has lived in the island since the 1980s, believes the island is at serious risk of slipping back into the problems it faced in social and health care then, stating people should not be left to live in some of the conditions they see in the 21st century.

Despite the cut to the service, Spot on Cleaners refused to blame Mrs Beecroft, saying she was in a difficult position and with pressures on DHSC to make savings, any decision was likely to prove unpopular.

While the company recognised that all businesses had costs to meet with limited time and resources, Mr Charnley noted that until he witnessed for himself how growing old or being disabled could affect an individual’s independence and social life, he may have been unaware of how much just a brief time of contact can make a big difference to some people’s life as well as their physical, mental and emotional health.

He encouraged all residents of the island to keep this in mind.

Spot on Cleaners hopes this community spirit will encourage other local cleaning firms to step forward and offer support, believing with more than 40 local cleaning firms, if they all gave just a few hours a week then the island can as a whole community support those most in need of assistance to live as independently as possible.