With the introduction of the Government’s Sustainability Development Strategy, sustainability will play a big part in decision-making, meaning factors such as fuel efficiency and benefits to the community will be considered.
Editorial Comment
Companies are waking up to the idea that joint initiatives are a good way of promoting responsibility at the lowest possible cost. Industry-wide initiatives make sense: they mean the cost burden of auditing suppliers is shared and if compliance means costs do rise, all partners can operate on a level playing. Hence Taco Bell’s eagerness to get its competitors onto a higher cost base too. After all, social responsibility at any cost would be unsustainable.
This is where we think the government’s sustainability drive appears a little ambiguous. The notion of ‘best value’ in public procurement was introduced in the halcyon days of New Labour as a way of modernising the cumbersome public sector. Now, with the introduction of the government’s Sustainable Development Strategy, sustainability will play a big part in decision-making, meaning factors such as fuel efficiency and benefits to the community will be considered. Since the government is by far the biggest buyer of goods and services in the economy (40% of GDP is spent by the public sector), this strategy should prove an effective way of encouraging sustainability.
But with ‘best value’ not necessarily meaning ‘lowest cost’, there is a danger that government plans might well run foul of EU rules.
The <i>EU Procurement Directives</i> require "full, fair and transparent" competition throughout the member states where public funds are to be used for the purchase of goods and services. This means local and national governments must advertise projects across all member states and ensure that all tenders received are considered under fair and objective criteria. All this begs the question, how will procurement officers respond to the burden of reconciling sustainable procurement with "full, fair and transparent" competition? In the end, of course, without a common EU-wide approach, this may all lead to accusations of UK protection.
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