Public Procurement Needs to Get Serious about Climate Change

As I write this, we are only 48 hours away from knowing who our new Prime Minister is in the UK. Unless there is a huge shock – and the betting has the odds at about 90:10 probability  - Liz Truss will be the winner.

She will inherit a country struggling with a cost of living crisis, unaffordable energy for millions, a National Health Service in a state of almost collapse, a supposed public sector dental service that has collapsed, growing inequality and homelessness, and life expectancy dropping for the first time in decades. But don’t worry – Truss is going to look at increasing the speed limit on Motorways.

Whilst that was a throw-away comment, it was typical of the recent “hustings” meetings. The two final candidates have said any old rubbish that they think might win votes from the 160,000 Conservative Party members who hold the decision in their ageing hands. But it is indicative of the worrying lack of focus on environmental issues during the campaign.

You would think that when asked the question, she could have said something like this – “well, higher speed limits would bring safety issues of course. There would be more deaths and injuries. It would also lead to more use of petrol (or energy more generally), and this isn’t perhaps the right time to do that when we are in the middle of an energy crisis. So although I can see how speed limits can be frustrating, I do not think this should be top of our priority list right now”.

In fact, the only comments of note on climate and the environment have been stupid or negative or both. Truss said that “On my watch, we will not lose swathes of our best farmland to solar farms”, and Rishi Sunak, her rival, followed by similarly promising to prevent agricultural land from being covered with “swathes of solar panels”.

Yet there are already rules that prevent superior quality agricultural land being used in this way, and the total amount of land covered in panels is incredibly small – less than 1% in the UK. This was political posturing to appeal to Tory members who instinctively hate anything new and cling on to a vision of a “green and pleasant land.”  During the campaign, Sunak also said: “I want to reassure communities that as Prime Minister I would scrap plans to relax the ban on onshore wind in England, instead focusing on building more turbines offshore.”

So at a time when our energy dependence on Russia is causing high economic shocks, and the UK faces rationing and power cuts if we have a chilly winter, our leaders are backing off from key renewable options. We’ve heard nothing about initiatives for more home insulation, or other power saving initiatives. Truss is also implicated in the 2017 closure of the UK’s largest gas storage facility – a decision that is coming back to haunt us now.

More widely, there appears to be a lack of enthusiasm for sustainable and purposeful initiatives. Jacob Rees Mogg, the Minister for Procurement, made some noises about whether social value in public procurement has gone too far some months ago, but he hasn’t followed through on his vague mutterings. But many experts are disappointed by the lack of more real action or interest.

Now David Shields, co-founder of Value Match and ex-MD of OGC Buying Solutions, the government’s biggest collaborative buying body (now CCS), has launched a campaign to get a stronger approach to emissions into the new UK Procurement Bill that is currently going through debate and amendment in Parliament.

Public bodies already have a somewhat vague requirement to “consider” environmental issues  in major procurements, alongside other wider government priorities, such as the mythical “levelling up.”  Major suppliers to government also have to show they have a plan to reach net zero by 2050. But that is a long way off, and Shields wants more regulatory action now. He wants to see “binding legal obligations on all parties to absolutely enshrine climate change in designing requirements for service, goods and works and assessing suppliers suitability to contract with the public sector.”  That should be embedded in the new regulations, he believes, and he has launched a petition to try and get this considered by government.

To be honest I’m not sure of the best way of achieving his goals, but it does feel that the government is not as committed to significant climate action as it should be. And the performance of the two Prime Ministerial contenders in recent weeks has hardly filled us with confidence from that point of view. But as usual, the short-term political issues – in particular, the cost of living crisis – are likely to take centre stage in the coming months. So any nudging we can give to show that many of us do care about these wider issues is worthwhile.

I have supported the petition, and you can read more here from David. Do put your name to it too if you feel positive about the aims - and well done to David Shields for taking the initiative here.