Source · Select Committees · Environmental Audit Committee
Recommendation 11
11
Deferred
Paragraph: 40
Require full departmental reporting on Greening Government Commitments and publish 2021-22 data.
Conclusion
Sustainable government procurement presents a pathway to increasing the sustainability of supply chains. Government performance against existing sustainable procurement policies has been unimpressive to date. The 2020–21 Greening Government Commitments report indicated that ten departments had submitted information about their performance against the procurement commitment in that year. Given that 2020–21 was a year in which the pandemic had a significant impact, the Cabinet Office ruled that the data submitted “should not be considered as a representative measure of overall government performance against this commitment” and declined to publish the data submitted. We expect Ministers to require full reporting by their departments against the procurement commitment, and all other Greening Government Commitments, for 2021–22: in the interests of transparency and the encouragement of high levels of compliance, the data should be published in full in the 2021–22 annual report.
Government Response Summary
The government response entirely diverts from the recommendation to require full and published reporting against Greening Government Commitments, instead detailing consultation feedback on the number of forest risk commodities for due diligence legislation and deforestation footprint statistics.
Paragraph Reference:
40
Government Response
Deferred
HM Government
Deferred
As part of our consultation in 2021–22 we asked respondents for their views concerning the number of forest risk commodities that should initially be included in due diligence legislation. Campaign responses from Greenpeace and Global Witness advocated for the introduction of 5 – 7 commodities within 12 months of the secondary legislation. However, the majority of non-campaign responses (including businesses, industry associations, NGOs, and private individuals) thought that between 2 – 4 commodities should be included in initial legislation. These respondents preferred that the government prioritise those commodities with the largest environmental impact if it meant that the regulations could come into force more quickly. Furthermore, respondents thought that lessons from the first tranche of commodities could inform the implementation of the regulations for future tranches. consultation feedback, an assessment of each commodity’s role in global deforestation, the UK’s contribution to that deforestation, and the UK’s ability to effectively regulate that commodity. We believe that this approach will enable efforts to eliminate the UK’s deforestation footprint to be focused initially on those commodities responsible for driving the most deforestation. We calculated that an estimated 64% of the UK’s tropical deforestation footprint is driven by the consumption of cattle, cocoa, palm oil and soy using data from the Global Environmental Impacts of Consumption indicator3,4. The estimated 5-year average (2014– 2018) of deforestation associated with UK consumption for each of those commodities was totalled (equalling c23,000 hectares per annum) and then divided by the estimated total deforestation risk of UK consumption over that period (c36,000 hectares per annum), with those four commodities therefore accounting for 64% of the UK tropical deforestation footprint. Measurement of this indicator was revised in late 2023, including the addition of data up to 2021, expansion of the data set to include non-tropical forests and significant wider methodological improvements. All previously reported environmental impact estimates have been updated and revised in the dataset to align with these changes and ensure consistency across the time series. Using this new data, the revised estimated proportion of UK linked deforestation (both tropical and non-tropical) caused by its consumption of the four commodities was 52% in 2021 (c15,000 hectares from a total UK deforestation footprint of c28,000 hectares). A further 22% of the UK’s estimated footprint is caused by consumption of timber and timber products, which is regulated separately by the UK Timber Regulations. No other commodity is estimated to account for more than 4% of total UK deforestation footprint in 2021.