Responsible procurement is a buying process that considers social, environmental and economic impacts to support sustainable development. Within our context, the University’s Head of Procurement, Kevin Casey, explains our approach as:

"How we ensure that the environmental, social and economic impacts of what we buy are considered within the procurement process. Where the goods or services we purchase have negative impacts we will reduce them and where we have positive impacts, we will enhance them."

Some organisations refer to sustainable procurement, ethical procurement, or green purchasing; we chose responsible procurement because it covers our approach, rationale and embraces the whole scope of what we do and how we do it.

We believe that a responsible procurement approach contributes to delivering excellent procurement.

Increasingly organisations are being asked how they consider a wide range of environmental and social issues within their purchasing practice to clearly demonstrate they are responding to a variety of important issues including, amongst others: social value, modern slavery and the climate emergency declaration. Our responsible procurement approach enables us to recognise these challenges and adapt our processes, approaches and contracts to help us and our suppliers to contribute positively to them.

Responsible procurement also supports the University’s objectives on social responsibility and helps us respond to changing expectations around supply chain transparency and visibility. It assists in meeting our legislative obligations, as well as our civic commitments as a Manchester anchor institution, whether measuring our impact or assisting local and/or SME suppliers to access contracting opportunities.

We have a long-standing commitment to delivering responsible procurement and we have done much to raise the profile of this way of working within the HE Sector. However, we still have a long way to go in supporting supply chain initiatives to stop forced labour, reduce plastic use and work towards carbon neutral deliveries. We are committed to continue sharing our experiences; you can find out more about these and modern slavery below.

We have demonstrated our willingness to innovate and challenge ourselves through our progress towards a more responsible procurement approach. We will continue to change what we do and how we do it in pursuit of procurement best practice.

We are working in several areas to make positive changes:

Responding to the climate emergency

Integrating climate emergency considerations into the procurement process and our supplier engagement activities is a priority.  We have undertaken an initial review of how our local Greater Manchester suppliers are contributing and this stream of activity will be continually developed. This will support the University's approach in this area. 

Developing and embedding social value through procurement

We have a number of interrelated activities underway to look at how we can recognise the value we deliver from our purchasing activity.

One of our apprentices is working on her final project as part of the apprenticeship programme focussing on social value and how we should best integrate it within our processes and contracts.

We worked with partners including the police, local authorities, purchasing consortia and NETpositive Futures to explore how social value is embedded and measured within procurement activity and what common lessons can be shared from this. We produced an overview of the project and an article in ECOnnect, an NWUPC newsletter.

You can now read the final report which further evidences how the Procurement Team's work aligns with the University's social responsibility.

We have recently signed up to the Social Value Portal and will work with them and our colleagues in Estates to recognise, improve and report on the impacts that we create from our construction activity. We expect that our learning will allow us to use a similar approach across other categories of our spend.

Flexible Framework and ISO 20400

Best practice on responsible procurement is always developing, we have already produced a comparison of two approaches; the Flexible Framework and new ISO20400. The guidance we produced showed the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches and suggested a way forward for higher education institutions. We will build on this further to highlight what best practice in sustainable procurement looks like and how this might be achieved.

Transparency and reporting

We have undertaken to be transparent in what we do and continue to report progress on both our responsible procurement journey and our activities in general.

We have shared a number of reports over the preceding years including demonstrating the impact of 1,000 suppliers and the 1,000 suppliers Infographic. We will continue to develop new initiatives and projects which will challenge the current thinking and practice of our team and those we work with.

Working initially with NETpositive Futures we developed a supplier engagement tool which helps suppliers develop sustainability action plans for free. Since work was completed, over 40 universities and Purchasing Consortia are now using the tool and it has expanded into the Blue-light Services and local authorities.  To date, the approach has meant over 60,000 actions have been committed to by our suppliers, covering everything from modern slavery to climate action.