Evidence Base
21. Good training and a raising of awareness can
only be founded upon a sufficiency of accurate information to
inform understanding and assist in making good choices and sustainable
decisions. While there are still some issues about the quality
of the available guidance, there is certainly a dearth of detail
and hard substance within it. In particular there are too few
case studies of successful (and unsuccessful) procurement decisions—speaking
from a sustainability perspective—and not enough general
data about how much procurement is indeed sustainable, or what
the cost implications, positive or negative, have been. Such
information is vital in order to inform more useful policy work
in this area, and also to assist those who are making day-to-day
and week-to-week decisions to make them well. Commentators have
already pointed out to us that at the moment a small number of
useful case studies are being circulated and re-circulated through
guidance and training. A
much broader array of successful (and unsuccessful) case studies
in sustainable procurement needs to be broadcast across government
as a matter of some urgency.
The more cases studies—best, and worst, practice—there
are in circulation, the more analogous one or two may be to a
current situation for a practitioner. In short, the more there
are, the more relevant they are; and the more relevant they are,
the more useful they are.
22. A quick and efficient means of dissemination
of data and case studies is the Internet. OGC has added to its
web-site (and OGCbuying.solutions, likewise) since our predecessor
Committee's criticism of it last year,[36]
but its SD content is still far from prominent and indeed appears
to be—once again—just one optional extra amongst others
adverted to on the site. OGCbuying.solutions's web-site has improved
far more, but the most promising web-site, www.sustainablesolutions.gov.uk,
is still a pilot, under indiscernible development, the near useless
state in which it has languished since early 2005. Its section
for case studies is now "currently under review", until
recently having been filled with incomprehensible macaronic text.
OGC explained to us—after an apology as to the continued
lack of usefulness of the site—that this pilot episode in
the web-site's development was necessary.[37]
However, it is still not clear why such a lengthy period for piloting
this web-site—with so little progress visible during that
time—was required. Little if anything seems to have changed
in the two months since then—and it is difficult to imagine
that as low a priority as appears to have been accorded to this
excellent idea for a sustainability web-site would have been granted
to one advising on HMT-ordained cost savings, for example. The
sustainable solutions web-site needs to be up-and-running
as soon as possible: other procurement web-sites also need to
maximise their coverage of sustainability and make environmental
issues much more prominent, indeed central, to their contents.
Again, within the current culture
of OGC, sustainability is simply a low priority and an optional
extra.
23. The lack of hard data in this area also means
that the evidence base necessary for making clear the cost and
other benefits of sustainable procurement to those within the
Government who are still sceptical on this issue is just not available.
While the Government has clearly stated (in its Sustainable Development
Strategy, for example[38])
that sustainable procurement is the only way forward, and
while, regardless of how sustainable procurement is perceived
within individual government departments, it has to be the duty
of 'green' or SD Ministers in particular, and of senior officials,
to spread the word and ensure conformity to the principles of
sustainable procurement, people also need to be won over to the
cause.
24. HMT, through the advice that OGC offers, appears
to believe that whole-life costs, still not assessed as frequently
in procurement decisions as they ought to be (and advice to do
so predates the adoption of SD principles and goes back some 25
years),[39] should feature
regularly and prominently in procurement decisions. This conviction
may still be only partial or superficial in parts of the Treasury
and OGC—and whatever scepticism lies beneath this surface
acceptance is no doubt mirrored inside other departments. The
case for sustainable procurement can be made from SD principles
alone—and
so is not cost-dependent—but
a good case can also be made that sustainable choices often work
out cheaper in the long term. Data is needed to make this point
clear—more
data than is currently available—and
we hope that the Action Plan sets set out clearly and specifically
not only what data needs to be captured, but how it is to be collated,
by whom—and
how it will be then made available. Obviously, if OGC is to lead
on the agenda then OGC needs to be at the centre of this work.
25. Even were the conviction to be held firmly
by OGC and procurement teams across the Government that sustainable
choices can work out as cheaper choices over time, they would
face the very real likelihood of an initially higher outlay for
a purchase—justifiable on grounds including lower whole-life
costs—being turned down by those financially responsible.
This emphasises the need for those responsible for budgets—even
those at the highest level in a department—to be involved
in the sustainable procurement agenda and to be trained and advised
to the requisite level. We have touched on this earlier in dealing
with training, but it bears repeating. The monomaniac focus on
cost savings by departments' finance officials threatens to overturn
what good work and clear progress is often made by procurement
teams. It is perhaps necessary again to refer to the NAO Review
which revealed that 14 government departments reported that reducing
costs was considered more important than the drive towards sustainability.[40]
Nor are externalities properly reflected in assessments of cost.
Whatever OGC and DEFRA may
have said in their evidence to us there is still in many government
departments a clearly undesirable tension between what is seen
as cost-effective and what is seen as sustainable procurement,
a tension which needs to be resolved as a matter of urgency.
36 HC266, para13 Back
37
Q23 Back
38
see Securing the Future- UK Government sustainable development
strategy, Chapter 3, part 5 Back
39
Ev28 Back
40
NAO Review, p30, para 4.6 Back
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