Public Procurement (Amendment etc.) (EU Exit) Regulations 2020

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Monday 16th November 2020 Grand Committee

[Baroness Boycott (CB) [V]]

My Lords, it is a delight to follow the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, and I agree with his point about the need for transparency in awarding contracts. If the last few months have shown us anything, it is the enormous power of procurement and what it can do when aligned with the right motives.

Following on from what the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, said, I have a few brief remarks about widening the remit and taking into account both the environmental and public health impacts, effectively, of the things we buy. The Government’s buying standards for public procurement are closely aligned with the EU’s Green Public Procurement programme, but they are not mandatory and therefore do not have enough teeth. A recent report from Sustain, the alliance for better food and farming, shows that two-thirds of councils have left food out of their climate emergency plans, only 20% include the climate implications of procurement at all, and only 13 councils are considered to have suitable plans in place, given that we face a climate emergency. This report is about to be released but, apart from the statistics above, about 67% of council climate action plans contain no new or substantial proposals on food. I think everyone has learned in the last few months or years just what that means for biodiversity and climate change.

Also, for public health, a good diet in the public sector needs to be normalised at a national level. At the moment this generally means councils going against the grain, with limited budgets to implement change. We should have mandatory standards for serving meals high in fruit and vegetables and low in ultra-processed foods and serving less meat across the public sector. We need to make it easier and quite normal to serve better meat and dairy and to work more locally. This has a lot of benefits for both the environment and the sustainability of small farms. When I ran the London Food Board, we set up a big buying scheme among a bunch of schools and were able to deliver cheaper and better food through intelligent purchasing.

The Government’s other great big success story is the buying standards for sustainable fish. We now have strong, clear rules and they have been adopted by caterers in the public sector in workplace and university restaurants, and by a lot of retailers. This has shown the great potential for public sector food to establish and embed high standards in the new normal. In 2017, however, a Department of Health report found that only 52% of hospitals, of all places, were actually compliant with Government’s own buying standards. I urge the Government to do something about it.

Before I finish, I have some questions. Will the Government commit to all public procurement tendering processes for contract renewals being aligned with our net zero 2050 target? Finally, can the Minister confirm whether all government departments have a specific sustainable procurement policy in place? If the answer is “not all departments”, can the Minister tell me which departments have it and which do not?