Recommendation 11

Sustainable government procurement presents a pathway to increasing the sustainability of supply chains. Yet Government performance against existing sustainable procurement policies has been unimpressive. The removal of the mandatory reporting obligation by Government departments against the Greening Government Commitments has led to a dearth of data and has hampered the monitoring of compliance with the Government Buying Standards, to the extent that it appears at present impossible to know whether departments have improved their sustainable procurement performance. In the run up to COP15 and COP26, and at a time when the Government should be showing leadership on sustainability issues, its departments appear instead to be moving backwards. This increased opacity over departmental sustainability practices is unacceptable.