Bates Wells: A simple guide to embedding sustainable procurement in your organisation

12th February, 2025

By Megan Watkins, Senior Operations Manager at Bates Wells

At a time where social and environmental responsibility is at the forefront of people’s minds, running procurement sustainably is crucial. This blog highlights some tips and considerations for embedding sustainable and ethical practices into your organisation, based on how we run procurement at Bates Wells.

Steps to Embed Sustainable Procurement

1. Creating procurement policies and procedures

A good starting point is considering what you want your procurement policy to be so you can build your processes around this. At Bates Wells, we have a short, clear policy giving preference to socially responsible businesses. To develop yours, think about what’s important to your organisation and key stakeholders, for example sourcing local produce.

Once you have your policy, it’s helpful to document a procurement process and some guidance to sit alongside this to help people in your organisation follow any internal processes and understand any wider applicable considerations. The process can be a simple flow chart detailing required steps to purchasing something, from supplier onboarding, to order approval, and quality control checks.

The guidance can be a more detailed note setting out factors to consider during the procurement process. For example, Information Security matters like whether a Non-Disclosure Agreement is required or environmental considerations like reusing other products or buying plastic free products.

2. Sourcing sustainable suppliers

A great starting point to sourcing new suppliers is utilising existing directories which list ethical and sustainable suppliers. Many of these already conduct their own checks on suppliers which can be helpful in creating added reassurance. For example, we use the Buy Social Directory and the B Corp Directory. You can also review membership pages for organisations like the Good Business Charter and Ethical Trading Initiative – or Made in Great Britain for British products.

Some platforms allow you to filter suppliers according to different criteria such as black or LGBTQ+ led businesses which can be helpful depending on what’s important to your organisation.

3. Onboarding suppliers

Once you’ve sourced a potential supplier, it’s then important to carry out your own due diligence. At Bates Wells we use a supplier questionnaire and code of conduct which we send to all new potential suppliers. We have a dedicated contract manager / lead contact responsible for the relationship with the supplier. That person has responsibility for sending the supplier questionnaire and code of conduct, but you may have a dedicated procurement lead or team you would like to handle this.

Supplier questionnaire

This contains a series of questions to review a potential supplier’s credentials and is something you can develop yourself (and there are ‘off the shelf’ systems too). Developing your own allows you to home in on areas of importance to you, such as questions about supplier ownership, carbon footprint monitoring and anti-modern slavery commitments. If you have different certifications or accreditations which ask questions about your supply chain, it may be worth building these questions in to help you meet your commitments.

We used Excel to create our questionnaire which allows us to upload the responses into our case management system so the responses are on the relevant suppliers file.
Code of Conduct

Our Supplier Code of Conduct guides suppliers on aspects of our procurement process and highlights areas of particular importance to Bates Wells in relation to how we’d like our suppliers to employ socially responsible practices in their businesses. It helps us set expectations of our suppliers to help ensure their values align with ours. E.g., that we expect our suppliers to pay and promote the (London) Real Living Wage and ensure their operations and supply chains are free from modern slavery.

When the questionnaire is returned to us via a central mailbox, this is checked by a member of the procurement team and any concerns highlighted with the relevant contract manager. If there are any serious concerns, these will be highlighted to our COO.
Sustainable agreement Clauses

For some contracts, you may consider adding some specific ethical or sustainable clauses for a more formal approach to ensuring a supplier’s performance in certain areas. E.g., requiring a supplier to utilise a responsible recycling stream for waste products or materials, or a requirement to measure their carbon footprint within a certain timeframe.

4. Review

Once a supplier is onboarded, it’s important to implement an ongoing review programme. This helps ensure any commitments or expectations of your suppliers are reviewed on a periodic basis – including any KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Consider creating a review programme dependent on the size of your organisation and the contract, e.g. regular suppliers with a larger spend reviewed on a quarterly basis, and others on an annual basis.

If you are a smaller organisation, this may be an annual review meeting with your core suppliers. For larger organisations, manufacturers and suppliers of goods you may need a more robust process, with more formal reviews.

It’s helpful to keep some centralised notes or records of key points discussed to track agreed actions and show any external auditors (e.g. for ISO certifications) evidence of supplier reviews.

Creating a standard agenda as a basis for the review meetings can be useful, especially if there are certain matters you’d like to be discussed with all suppliers. Discussing ethical and sustainability issues during these meetings is a great way to track progress up and down supply chains – and share ideas to increase impact.

For some suppliers, it’s prudent to carry out follow up on-site audits. These can be as simple or detailed as you require – a premises tour and reviewing some key documents, or a more in-depth look at policies and procedures relevant to your purchasing and spend.

Embedding sustainable procurement practices is essential for organisations aiming to be socially and environmentally responsible. The key steps to integrate these practices effectively include developing procurement policies that reflect your values (such as prioritising ethical and socially responsible businesses); sourcing sustainable suppliers; conducting due diligence with tools such as supplier questionnaires and codes of conduct; holding suppliers to account with contract clauses; and implementing a review cycle. Throughout this, it is important to make sure that any processes you put in place are proportionate to your size, your supplier and your spend with them.

If you’d like some further tips, take a look at these guides on our website: