Foreign Office cleaners investigated by employers after asking to be paid the living wage

Cleaners from outsourcing company Interserve wrote to Philip Hammond to ask that their £7.05-an-hour pay be increased

They asked for a meeting with Mr Hammond to discuss increasing their wages to the £9.15-an-hour rate recommended by the Living Wage Foundation (Rex)

Fourteen cleaners at the Foreign Office are under investigation by their employers for writing to Philip Hammond to complain about their £7.05-an-hour pay.

Outsourcing company Interserve summoned the 14 to individual meetings for “bringing the contract into disrepute” over a letter in July that congratulated the Foreign Secretary on his appointment before raising concerns about their pay.

They asked for a meeting with Mr Hammond to discuss increasing their wages to the £9.15-an-hour rate recommended by the Living Wage Foundation, which is backed by nearly 2,000 employers including the Department for Energy and Climate Change.

Three of the 14 have since been made redundant including a leader of the campaign, Katy Rojas, 44, a union organiser from Ecuador, who has been told that she will have to leave her job early next month. The company has claimed that nobody has been made redundant because of their role in signing the letter.

In a short personal testimony included with the letter to Mr Hammond, Ms Rojas wrote: “My country is called a Third World country but there they treat cleaners better than here. I don’t understand why we are treated like nothing.”

In a letter sent to the 14 six weeks after the letter to Mr Hammond, Interserve’s UK operations manager, Simon Thornton, warned Ms Rojas that she could be suspended and said she was being called to a meeting to “voice your version of events”.

Ms Rojas said that she had a meeting with two members of Interserve management at the same Foreign Office building that she and her colleagues cleaned. She says she was warned by officials at the company about breaking the terms of her contract and “embarrassing them in front of the FCO”. “They showed me the letter and asked, did I sign the letter? I said Yes,” Ms Rojas told The Independent. “They said my boss laughed at me and said – you will get nothing from the minister.”

The Foreign Office – which passed the letter back to the contractor – also claimed that the job losses were unconnected with the letter, but was linked to a move out of one of its offices for refurbishment work. All of its cleaners are provided by Interserve.

It said it had not taken any disciplinary measures against any cleaning staff. In a letter to charity, London Citizens, which has taken up the case of the 14, the Foreign Office minister David Lidington said: “I would regard it as wrong were any cleaners to be victimised because they had written to ministers to set out their concerns.”

The Foreign Office also claimed that the company had assured it that no disciplinary action would be taken against the 14. The company has so far given no such assurance. It said there was an investigation into a “potential breach of employment contract” but said it would inappropriate to comment further.