£160 billion is a huge amount of money. Think of what can be done with it.

The public sector spends this much every year on goods and services, and achieves a great deal from it. It builds and runs schools, hospitals, offices and roads. It buys more electricity than the cities of Birmingham and Liverpool combined. It treats waste, buys food, maintains grounds and facilities, and much more besides.

But we believe that this spend could be harnessed to achieve even more – by focusing on sustainable goods and services wherever possible.

Our work in the area of public sector procurement and supply chain management focuses on helping our partners to deliver twice as much with their budgets. We help them deliver practical sustainability benefits while making sure that needs are met and true value for money is delivered.

The type of practical benefits we mean include: providing work for the long-term unemployed, health benefits from more sustainable food, lower emissions and air pollution levels from more sustainable vehicles, and less waste going to land fill.

Focusing spending on sustainable goods and services is also an important catalyst for sustainable innovation and market development.

We engage with partners across the public sector, at local, regional and national levels, to build sustainable procurement good practice. Our work has involved:

• Developing The Sustainable Procurement Toolkit, supported by the Buying a Better World report. This toolkit, released in March 2008, includes a method for prioritising supply areas for sustainable
  procurement, a demand review tool, sustainability review/tender
  planner, and a whole life costing tool.
• Providing the evidence base for the Sustainable Procurement Task Force ‘Procuring the Future’ action plan.
• Developing strategies and action plans that enable Local Authorities to address the requirements of and benchmark against the Sustainable Procurement Task Force’s Flexible Framework.
• Working with procurement staff to develop pilot contracts that cover a wide range of goods and services including construction and health care.
• Designing training programmes for procurement staff so that sustainability is integrated into the mainstream procurement process.
• Engaging staff at all levels on the sustainable procurement agenda.