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Environmental news: New carbon reduction centre for Civil Service


A new centre of excellence is to be set up to help Whitehall departments achieve their targets for reducing carbon emissions and waste across the government estate.

Details of the Centre of Expertise for Sustainable Procurement (CESP) were unveiled as the Government published its response to the Sustainable Development Commission’s latest report on how the Government is meeting its own sustainable objectives for tackling climate change.
 

Today’s 6th annual Sustainable Development in Government (SDiG) report by the independent watchdog and adviser on sustainability shows a small improvement in the Government’s overall performance against its key ‘eco’ commitments – including a four per cent fall in carbon emissions across the estate by the end of 2006/7. However, the Commission called on departments to urgently build on initiatives already taken to ensure targets can be met and to demonstrate that the Government is leading by example on sustainability.

The CESP will be set up within the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) alongside the Government’s Chief Sustainability Officer – a new post to be appointed to take forward a culture of change across all departments in sustainable operations and procurement.


Among the steps that will be taken are the following:

  • From April 2008 all departmental heads will have a specific objective to meet Sustainable Operations on the Government Estate (SOGE) targets, against which their performance will be assessed
  • A major Green Government IT programme will be launched in the summer
  • From 2010 all central Government departments will be included in a pioneering emissions trading scheme, the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC), which will compel them to improve their energy efficiency.  This mandatory emissions trading scheme will cover around 5000 public and private organisations, including government departments, retailers, banks and local authorities, which combined account for 10 per cent of the UK economy’s emissions
  • Action to achieve the work space efficiency standard of 12 square metres per FTE will be published in April 2008
  • From this summer all new vehicles used by ministers and permanent secretaries (except a small number exempt for operational reasons) will have carbon emissions below 130g/km
  • The use of bottled water for meetings and other official business is to be phased out across the whole government estate by the summer.
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