The CRP Process: What Service Providers Need to Know
Policy Procurement Note (PPN) 06/21 set out the requirements for Carbon Reduction Planning. This requirement was implemented from 22nd September 2021. The good news was that it was applied to government and government agency contracts (including the NHS) with an annual value of £5m. Several factors about the Plan have been added to the SQ as pass/fail questions in relevant tenders. These include the publication of your CRP report on your website and ensuring that it has been updated during the 12 months prior to the tender closing date. So that is good then, we do not need to worry do we?

 Actually, yes and here is why:
1) The PPN refers to Government contracts. Increasingly Councils are adopting plans with the intention of “influencing” others to adopt their own plans. The following are examples of published plans
•    Lambeth
•    Herefordshire
•    Derbyshire
•    Cambridgeshire
•    Harrogate
These, and other Councils can be expected to start to introduce the requirement for a CRP before too long, and the government to make the necessary global change to the SQ to include CRP reporting soon, possibly as part of the new Procurement Act expected early in 2022.

2) The planning process requires the organisation to set a base year and calculate the report which complies with the set standard for that year. Then to repeat the process on an annual basis demonstrating gradually reducing emissions each year. This is not something which can be put in place quickly and easily. It requires a lot of detailed planning, training, data collection and “buy-in” at all levels so important to get started in plenty of time. We are seeing providers appointing a dedicated manager tasked with putting the plan in place.

But even getting a plan in place is not that straight forward for services providers.

The Problems
Services providers delving into the mass of Carbon Reduction Planning (CRP) documentation might be forgiven for describing it as “dense”. One of the problems is that there is so much of it to wade through. This is not to say that many people have spent much time and effort in putting this material together. But much appears to have been written in a “one size fits all” style focussing on the demands placed on manufacturers and suppliers of goods. Categories described for inclusion across the three “scopes” do not necessarily apply to the majority of providers across the sectors tendering to provide services to the UK public sector.

A couple of examples appearing in scopes 1 and 3 are:
Scope 1 –emissions arising from the use of company owned transport cites buses and aircraft. We do not know of many UK services providers, except perhaps multinationals which own private aircraft for transporting their staff, whilst business travel by air is a category in scope 3 little used across the sector;
Scope 3 – includes transportation and distribution of finished products. This includes the processing of sold products and supply chain emissions,  much of which will not be relevant to services provision.

This guidance in some ways makes it difficult for the many thousands of services providers who tender for public sector contracts to calculate their emissions performance consistently and accurately.

On the other hand, there is a huge are of emission calculations which is not addressed in this mass of documentation.

An important aspect of the response to COVID has been the growth across much of the services sector of working from home. This does not, of course, include the hospitality industry along with the majority of health workers who are location based. However, many staff at management level, even in these sub-sectors work from home. This phenomenon is not new. Many service sector staff have long worked from a home base or office. These include consultants across many sectors, accountants and financial specialists, those in the technology sector including programmers and a wide range technology - based specialists to name but a few. It is also true that there are many systems available whereby individuals can calculate their home “carbon footprint”. However, these systems tend not to apply to the statured measurements required for inputting into corporate CRP reporting.

The Solution
Probably the biggest problem for services providers is the urgent necessity for staff, managers at all levels and governance to learn what is required as it relates to their sector and how to put these requirements into practice so as to cut through all of the mostly unnecessary documentation and to learn:
•    what is required of my business?
•    what data do I need to collect?
•    how do I calculate our relevant emissions?
•    how do I construct my report for tendering and publication on our website?

These were the questions we set out to answer from our thirty-year perspective of tendering in the services sector. The urgency of the requirement led us to prioritise this learning as the first course in The Tendering Academy, a course which is now available under the courses tab.

But this is not just a course of learning. It includes all of the documentation and guidance needed to start drawing up a Carbon Reduction Plan:
•    how to calculate the emissions for the categories under each of the three scopes;
•    the government’s spreadsheet for calculating vehicle and mileage emissions; and crucially
•    how to go about producing the date relating to working from home.

It will be those who address this problem early who will avoid being excluded from tendering in the future and, like those who have already appointed a manager to take the lead in this effort, are able to stay ahead of the crowd and secure contract in the future.

You can contact us about this course at courses@thetenderingacademy.com