Sir Neville Simms has the mellow tone of a man blessed with patience, a characteristic not always apparent in one with the pioneer spirit to drive through modernisation in the construction industry, conceive the Private Finance Initiative and now head a major energy enterprise.
A year ago, under his chairmanship, the Sustainable Procurement Task Force presented government with ‘Procuring the Future’, a report aimed at a fundamental advance in sustainable public procurement and raising the UK among EU leaders in the field by 2009. Backed by annual spending power of £150bn, the public sector has the responsibility to lead by its own procurement, to create a catalyst for sustainable supply, demand and innovation across the UK economy. At least, that’s the vision from the top.
The former Tarmac and Carillion boss, now chairman at International Power plc and the Building Research Establishment Trust, is now an interested independent observer who might wonder if the vision may yet fade under the vagaries of Whitehall’s pass-the-parcel leadership or take a pounding in the autumn as the Comprehensive Spending Review squeezes budgets further for the next three years.
There is no dodging the issue for Sir Neville. “Effective procurement and sustainability go hand in hand,”he says.“It is about supporting the wider social, economic and environmental objectives in ways that offer real long-term benefits”, he says in his report introduction. “Anything less means that today’s taxpayer and the future citizen are both short-changed.”
Reaction to the direction and pace of post- Simms progress varies among former task force colleagues. After months of growling over “wobbly procurement policy”, and in particular a reluctance to embed sustainability into performance frameworks, the chairman of the watchdog Sustainable Development Commission and Ethos guest editor, Jonathon Porritt, feels Whitehall has at last taken “a significant step forward” with its procurement action plan, its latest response to Simms, in the spring.
Slow pace of change
“Political statements don’t necessarily cause anything to happen,” says Sir Neville. “People are saying the right things at the top. We are on the move and it will move more rapidly three to five years on from the task force. People are still trying to understand what sustainability is about and to incorporate it into decisions underneath government’s policy umbrella. All the time, trying to draw on – here was the point of the task force – the experience of the best businesses who got this somewhat earlier than national government.”
Members of the task force also considered possible changes that might accelerate progress, including more focused cross-departmental procurement. This is starting to happen but Sir Neville points out that this is not a single business operation, the Prime Minister is not the chief executive and the range of commercial issues alone is wider than anything encountered in the private sector. The business value of sustainability makes sense; the City says it is an imperative for investors, and major retailers are now vying to outdo each other on how green they can be. On his task force tours, Sir Neville found leaders and laggards in business and government. “The best of the best companies got it five, even ten years ago, on an environmental level, and advanced with social responsibility into a full sustainable agenda. Equally, there are some great public sector champions,” he says.
Kirklees Council in Yorkshire, for instance, created a loan system in 1998 to fund and save on its utility consumption. Departments conduct an audit, target improvements and estimate savings before applying for a loan. They pay back half the expected savings each year until the loan is repaid, and in doing so make financial savings during the repayment period. The fund has saved more than £500,000 for this one authority.
