Agenda item

To discuss the adoption of the Charter which will make the Council’s requirements relating to socio-economic and environmental issues transparent to business supplying goods, works and services to the Council

Councillors received a presentation from the Environmental Coordination Manger and Procurement Manager on the new Sustainable Procurement Charter being proposed for Horsham District Council.

Public procurement is highly regulated with numerous pieces of legislation that relate to sustainable procurement and social value including: Public Contracts Regulations 2015, Public Services (social Value) Act 2012 and the Modern Slavery Act 2015 among others. The aim of the charter is to clearly enhance and collate these requirements into one document that we can present to potential suppliers, and officers noted that the recent National Procurement Policy Statement (June 2021) widely reflects what HDC’s Procurement charter aims to do.

The aims of the charter are not in themselves ground-breaking, most larger companies will be required to report to national government already and are familiar with complying with social value requirements in tender processes.  Most local authorities already have some form of policy or Charter in place already. The charter broadly reflects the aims set out in the Corporate plan and therefore many of HDC’s existing contracts already have similar requirements written into their specification however the charter will make this less ad hoc ensuring best practice is more consistently followed.

The aims of the charter has been developed with input from across HDC as well as looking at the practices of other councils, it was originally intended to focus solely on Sustainability and cutting carbon emission however this was expanded to include elements of Social value to better mirror national legislation and practices of other local authorities. 69% of HDC’s carbon footprint is out of our direct control and can only be calculated through proxy data, the reporting requirement set out in the charter will allow the council to better know the actual values of these emissions and should allow HDC to monitor and ensure year on year reductions in CO2 emissions.

The charter has been designed with a tiered approach to ensure that requirements are proportionate to the value of the contract and there is no suggestion that the charter will increase costs unless there is a specific requirement in the contracts specification e.g. mandating the used of electric vehicles.

While the tiers are set with financial thresholds it will remain flexible allowing the Council to incorporate it more completely for smaller contracts if they are deemed to be high risk in relation to emissions or social value. It is not believed that the charter will be detrimental to local and SME businesses as they can often fulfil some of the social value aspects more easily than larger businesses.

Councillors asked if the charter would change practices significantly and how success could be measured; on the whole the charter is collating current best practice and legislation so should not change the procurement process greatly except to make requirements more clear and visible to officers and potential suppliers. The main change will come in the management of contracts with the collation of data which will allow us to better manage or carbon emissions.

There was discussion as to whether there should be a tier where compliance was not mandatory of if the charter should apply fully to all contracts and if there was any way the tiers could betide to emissions rather than contract value.