Last week I went to a Sustainability event for suppliers to our local NHS Hospitals Trust (who I’ve done some work for over the years). The NHS has set some really ambitious targets for their supply chain which they want to be Net Zero by 2045. From last year, you won’t get a NHS contract worth over £5m without a carbon reduction plan and the requirements keep tightening until 2030 when there will be no procurement that doesn’t align to the Net Zero goal.

That’s very impressive and will be sharpening minds across the supplier base (and don’t forget the NHS is HUGE and buys huge amounts of stuff). But when we got to the presentation on tender assessments, my heart sank a little. NHS contracts will have a minimum of 10% of scores allocated to Sustainability, almost all of which corresponds to how well the tenderer meets the goals set out in the tender. There was little incentive to go above and beyond what has been asked for in the tender – a lower carbon version of business as usual.

I stuck up my hand and asked a question about innovation. The response was a rueful “these are the public procurement rules we are bound by.” And this is sadly true – it is not unknown for suppliers to challenge public procurement decisions if they feel they have met the requirements and have been passed over unfairly. If the tender is seen to favour one supplier – eg a Sustainability pioneer – it could end up in a costly legal wrangle. Of course the NHS can and does innovate (the Newcastle Hospitals Trust has some fantastic case studies) but always with one hand tied behind their back. Hardly ideal.

When I was writing Building a Sustainable Supply Chain, one of my favourite quotes came from Ramon Arratia, then EMEA Sustainability Manager for Interface, the flooring giant and Sustainability pioneer:

We continue to be impressed by what can be achieved when suppliers are encouraged to innovate and are rewarded for solving our problems instead of us trying to solve theirs. We have witnessed how much more the ‘inspire, measure, innovate’ approach can deliver than ‘code, questionnaire, audit’.

This mindset led to Interface being one of the first companies to produce products made from ocean-bound plastics, turning one environmental problem into a raw material. Ocean-bound plastics are now turning up in all kinds of other products as a result showing how one pioneer can open the door for many others.

How can the public sector embrace similar thinking within the strictures it works in? There are a number of approaches, including ‘objective-oriented procurement’ where the tender focusses on the output requirement rather than the delivery mechanism eg specifying required light levels in a particular location rather than the number of light fittings. But I suspect it will require the Government to change procurement rules – in my experience Scottish public bodies reward Sustainability much more generously than their English equivalents. Given the size of public sector procurement, there is a huge opportunity here, one that shouldn’t be passed up lightly.