All the tea and coffee bought through our UK supplier is Fairtrade

For the second-year running, we signed up to the Ministry of Defence’s Sustainable Procurement Charter. This commits us to best practice in sustainable procurement across all our Ministry of Defence contracts.

Carillion worked with Forum for the Future and ICI Paints AkzoNobel to produce Paint the Town Green, a study of sustainable innovation in the paint supply chain.

Supply chain

With over 25,000 suppliers, we can make a positive difference by encouraging our supply chain to address sustainability issues.

We have integrated sustainability considerations into our standard procurement procedures, to encourage existing suppliers to improve their sustainability performance and help us identify those with a strong track record when we select new suppliers. For example, our Supplier Accreditation process, which is used to assess all suppliers, includes questions on issues such as environmental management systems and responsible timber procurement. In 2009, we achieved 100% supplier accreditation, having inherited many new suppliers when we acquired Alfred McAlpine in 2008.

All suppliers are expected to comply with our Sustainable Procurement Policy and Supplier Charter. The policy covers issues such as safety and prompt payment of suppliers, as well as committing Carillion to engaging with our supply chain to jointly improve sustainability performance. It states that we will work to ensure that our suppliers treat their people fairly and with respect. We will not condone human rights violations in our supply chain and our Ethics and Business Integrity Policy confirms our support of the United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights. Adherence to the policies is monitored through our audits of selected suppliers.

One of the ways we support our suppliers to improve their safety and sustainability performance is by providing an online toolkit. This assesses the supplier’s current performance and, if the score is below 70% on any of the toolkit’s eight sections, an action plan is generated automatically to tackle the root causes.

We are also implementing the UK Government’s Sustainable Procurement Task Force Flexible Framework. The framework comprises five progressively challenging levels: foundation, embed, practice, enhance and lead. These levels are applied across five areas, including procurement process and engaging suppliers, to create a roadmap towards excellence in sustainable procurement. Having identified our priority procurement categories and achieved 90% compliance against level 2 in 2008, we worked towards achieving level 3 for these categories in 2009. It was not possible to achieve this fully, as the economic climate meant our supply chain teams needed to focus more resource on identifying efficiencies with our suppliers. However, progress was made to achieve 100% supplier accreditation.

One of the key categories in our framework is timber procurement. In early 2009 we held a number of supplier briefing sessions to raise awareness of our timber policy and ensure that suppliers prioritise Forest Stewardship Council accredited timber when delivering to Carillion.