David Kidney MP: The benefits of buying green

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Labour MP David Kidney urges the government to promote sustainable public sector procurement.

It is now almost universally acknowledged that climate change requires immediate and radical action. There is also a growing appreciation that tackling climate change cannot be done in isolation but must instead be part of a course of action that harmonises the environmental, economic and social needs of society through sustainable development.

Over the last year and a half I have been working to promote public sector procurement as a crucial method of pursuing sustainable development.

The public sector procures in excess of £175bn of goods, services and utilities each year. Sustainable procurement presents the opportunity of doing this not only in an environmentally sensitive manner, but also achieving much greater value for money for the public purse by reducing costs and securing wider social benefits.

The legacy of procurement means that it is vital that we get it right. For instance, it is now known that when building a school, unless it is orientated to maximise natural light and cooling, no amount of other measures taken later will make it possible to reduce so significantly the building's carbon footprint.

This encapsulates the essence of sustainable procurement, that addressing sustainability at the beginning of a project is cost effective and can have huge environmental and economic benefits over the life of the project. Conversely, addressing sustainability as the project goes on becomes exponentially more expensive and less effective.

Last year I chaired a Westminster Sustainable Business Forum inquiry into sustainable procurement which produced the report Costing the future: Securing value for money through sustainable procurement. The central findings of the report were that sustainable procurement is synonymous with value for money and that the best way to promote sustainable procurement is through the widespread use of whole life costing.

Since the report's publication I have been happy to see a number of government initiatives such as the creation of the Centre of Expertise for Sustainable Procurement that have begun to address the issues raised in that report.

However, on the crucial issue of whole-life costing there has been worryingly little progress. This means that procurers simply do not have the tools or information necessary to make properly informed decisions.

Furthermore, the way in which budgets are allocated can often provide an active disincentive to sustainable procurement.

If government is serious about addressing climate change and long term cost efficiency, it must promote more sustainable public sector procurement and to do this it must adopt whole-life costing in public sector procurement.