To truly get to grips with your council's carbon footprint, it's vital to ensure that sustainability is legally embedded into your procurement processes. The experts at Sustainable Procurement Cupboard have put together this guide to help you make it happen:

1. Understand your powers to incorporate sustainability initiatives into your procurement
2. Use available guidance and legislation to justify your actions
3. Embed sustainability into your organisation’s policy framework and document it
4. Include sustainability at the earliest possible stage in the procurement process, i.e. when making the business case for the procurement, so that it is within your core requirements for the procurement
5. Ascertain technical capacity and ability to deliver economic, social and environmental well-being outcomes within the contract requirement by asking relevant questions in Pre-Qualification Questionnaires
6. In your specification, describe sustainability requirements as specifically as possible
7. Get the bidders to expand in their method statements on their delivery of sustainability-based outcomes and outputs described in the specifications with sufficient clarity that you will be able to measure the contractor’s performance
8. Use contract conditions to enforce social and environmental requirements in contracts
9. Develop criteria for awarding contracts which address how value for money will be measured against comprehensive specifications which embed social and environmental issues as part of the whole contract requirement
10. Educate and train your people so that sustainability becomes the norm in procurement