When the NHS set out its net-zero plan in 2020, it did more than outline an environmental ambition. It also put procurement at the centre of one of the health service’s biggest decarbonisation challenges: the bulk of its emissions sit outside direct control, embedded in the goods and services it buys.
According to NHS England’s Greener NHS programme, the health service aims to reach net zero for emissions it controls directly by 2040 and for the wider emissions it influence...
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s by 2045. That second target, often described as the NHS’s Scope 3 challenge, is where NHS Supply Chain has been focusing its efforts. The organisation helps provide more than 35 million products a year to trusts and healthcare bodies across England and Wales, working with almost 1,500 active core suppliers.
Heidi Barnard, who joined NHS Supply Chain as head of sustainability in 2022, said the role came at a time of organisational change. Her task, she explained, was to pull together existing work into a single strategy and define the organisation’s purpose more clearly.
That remit is unusually broad. NHS Supply Chain does not buy in the same way as a conventional corporate purchasing team. Instead, it awards frameworks through competitive tenders, then makes compliant products available through a catalogue for trusts and other healthcare providers. Barnard said the scale and complexity are very different from buying a single device or item, because the organisation is procuring in bulk across thousands of product lines.
The NHS has also tightened its supplier expectations. NHS England approved a Net Zero Supplier Roadmap, which introduced a minimum 10% weighting for net-zero and social value in procurements from April 2022. The latest version of the roadmap sets out a phased approach, including carbon reduction plan requirements, emissions reporting and, from April 2028, product-level requirements. NHS England says suppliers will need to provide carbon reduction plans for all relevant emissions from April 2027.
A key part of that shift is the Evergreen Sustainable Supplier Assessment, launched by NHS England in 2023. The assessment asks more than 100 questions on issues such as circularity, social value and alignment with science-based targets, and it scores suppliers from level one to level four. NHS Supply Chain has said level one became the baseline expected at tender close from April 2026, after many suppliers had previously been able to win contracts without reaching that mark.
Barnard said the organisation spent considerable time engaging suppliers to understand why many were not meeting that threshold. In some cases, she suggested, the issue was not resistance but confusion over how the questions were framed. Level four, she said, is the long-term ambition and effectively represents a supplier base ready for the 2045 target.
Rather than treating the framework as a blunt exclusion tool, NHS Supply Chain has tried to use it as a signal to the market. Barnard said suppliers have generally responded positively and often see the requirements as a commercial advantage rather than a barrier. She also argued that the Evergreen model was designed to reduce duplication, after the organisation saw a growing number of sustainability platforms that smaller firms would struggle to navigate.
Cost remains the usual objection to greener procurement elsewhere, but Barnard said that is not the central issue in NHS Supply Chain discussions. In her view, sustainability should be understood through the benefits it can bring to patient care, resilience and value, not as a trade-off against them. Quality and patient safety remain paramount, she said, but they do not have to sit in opposition to decarbonisation.
“Our Scope 3 approach is to buy less, buy better, buy different,” Barnard said. “It’s always ‘and’, not ‘instead of’.”
That framing captures the NHS’s wider challenge. With more than 60% of its emissions linked to the supply chain, the route to net zero will depend not only on cleaner buildings and energy use, but on changing what the health service buys, how much it buys and the way suppliers are expected to prove their progress.
Source: Noah Wire Services
