Do we need a new best practice for our supply chains?

In the period 1990-95 the UK infrastructure sector had a big wake-up call on sustainability. Projects such as the M3 extension at Twyford Down and the second runway at Manchester Airport found themselves targeted by highly organised non-violent direct action by NGOs causing serious disruption to projects.

By 1995, the NGOs had changed tactics, mounting a highly effective campaign to push the Heathrow Terminal 5 project into a public enquiry that delayed the project seven years. 

Some leading contractors such as Carillion took up the challenge and started to develop sustainability strategies.

In 2002 the UK retail sector recognised the difficulties of collecting ethical data on their developing world supply chains and set up the Supplier Ethical Data Exchange (SEDEX) as a collaborative initiative to collect data and carry out audits that can be used by all partners.

In 2005, the government published its sustainable development strategy, Securing the Future and London won the right to stage the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

This led to the development of the sustainable procurement task force’s publication, Procuring the Future, the establishment of the Commission for a Sustainable London 2012 and my personal involvement in both.

All of this leads inevitably to the conclusion that today’s best practice is not good enough and we need a new best practice.

Procuring the Future recommended the application of the Flexible Framework, a simple maturity matrix designed to guide public procurers towards enabling sustainable procurement in their organisations.

This was never intended to be a comprehensive document but it was a start. To address this gap in guidance, a standard was developed based on emerging best practice and in 2010, BS 8903 was published.

The experience of the Commission for a Sustainable London 2012 taught us that if we scrutinise something hard enough, the cracks will start to show, and demonstrate that today’s best practice is not enough.

During construction, the ODA delivered unprecedented standards of sustainability but collecting performance data was an inefficient exercise involving an infinite number of spreadsheets, all slightly different.

The recent development of an online tool to measure performance in detail will make a difference as it becomes more widely used.

London 2012 also demonstrated that the deep, wide and diverse supply chain in the construction sector does not have the institutional competence to deliver high standards of sustainability consistently.

The Supply Chain Sustainability School, launched in the Olympic year, June 2012 starts to address this issue through collaboration between contractors, their clients and suppliers wit over 5,500 members learning about sustainability in a virtual environment.

It differs from Sedex in that it focuses investment on capacity development, not audits and questionnaires.

The ethical standards of the merchandise supply chain for London 2012 received unprecedented scrutiny. All suppliers were required to sign up to Sedex and have an audit, these audits were reviewed by the delivery team and manufacture was not allowed to start until corrective actions had been resolved, the whole process was reviewed by the Commission.

What could possibly go wrong? The Playfair Alliance, a trade union led organisation, put undercover workers into two factories in China and found breaches of all ten principles of the Ethical Trade Initiative Base Code in both factories.

All of this leads inevitably to the conclusion that today’s best practice is not good enough and we need a new best practice.

However I remain optimistic. There are a variety of great initiatives around the world and many of them are coming together in a new ISO standard that will not solve all our problems but it will be a great step forward when it is published in 2016.

If purchasers waste less resource on collecting useless information and conducting meaningless audits and more on building the body of knowledge and developing smarter ways to demonstrate performance we can create the new best practice together.

Shaun McCarthy is an independent adviser, author and speaker in the field of sustainable business policy and practice