Source · Select Committees · Environmental Audit Committee
Recommendation 10
10
Deferred
Paragraph: 39
Mandate Government Buying Standards for all large public sector bodies and annual compliance reporting.
Recommendation
We recommend that each Government Buying Standard be made mandatory for all large public sector bodies, including the NHS, the Armed Forces and HM Prison Service, as it currently is for UK Government departments and their partner organisations. Annual reporting on compliance against public procurement policies should also be mandatory for these large public bodies: the annual reporting should in each case indicate the proportion of overall goods procured which have been sourced from UK producers.
Government response summary AI-generated
The government deflects the recommendation regarding making Government Buying Standards mandatory and requiring annual compliance reporting for public sector bodies, instead detailing its existing and developing supply-side interventions and international funding programmes aimed at sustainable forest risk commodity supply chains.
Summary of the government's response below — read the verbatim text to verify.
Paragraph Reference:
39
Government Response
Deferred
HM Government · verbatim extract
Deferred
The UK Government is not currently considering widening the scope of the Government Buying Standards (GBS). The wider public sector is encouraged to specify the minimum mandatory Government Buying Standards (GBS) in tenders. Any organisation concerned about sustainable procurement may choose to comply with the GBS. Many large public bodies have their own sustainable procurement approaches which go even further than these standards. Public bodies such as the NHS also have their own sustainability reporting in place. To support this, they are signposted to public sector annual sustainability reporting guidance which covers the use of resources and sustainable procurement, including where some services are procured from. Complying with the Government buying standards for food and catering services (GBSF) is currently mandatory for central Government departments and their agencies, as well as HM Prison and Probation Service, NHS hospitals, and the armed forces in England. The GBSF were last updated in 2014 and require further updating to reflect regulatory changes, government priorities and the latest scientific evidence. Defra consulted on proposed updates to public sector food and catering policy, including proposed modernisation of the GBSF, from 13 June 2022 to 4 September 2022. Within the consultation, Defra proposed mandatory reporting on food and catering for those public sector organisations where the GBSF is mandatory, to build our understanding of what is bought, sold, and wasted in the public sector.
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