Standards and requirements

Essex & Suffolk Water are committed to improving its sustainable performance and to reduce the adverse environmental effects caused by its activities throughout the entire organisation at all levels, including those of suppliers. Through the implementation of a sensitive sustainable procurement policy, Essex & Suffolk Water intends to achieve this by adopting the following principles in ALL cases :

Principles

Our procurement activities should contribute to the achievement of excellence in the five core areas of Essex & Suffolk Water:  People, Customers, Competitiveness, Environment and Reputation.

The following policies are mandatory for all transactions:

• Best value for money.
• Competition based.
• Continuous performance improvements.
• Legal and regulatory compliance.
• Highest ethical standards.
• Transparent and fair trading
• Good environmental performance

In order to support these principles Essex & Suffolk Water will seek to:

• Treat all business partners with fairness and transparency.
• Build partnerships with suppliers to identify improvement opportunities and develop innovative solutions with benefits to all partners as well as to society and the environment.
• On an ongoing basis, review the works, goods and services we procure to ensure that they reflect a real need and that specifications include social and environmental criteria early in the process.
• Assess our suppliers on the basis of social and environmental criteria, in addition to financial ones.
• Focus our efforts on areas of high social/environmental impact and/or high commercial risk.
• Lead and support local economic development of the communities we serve and to this end we will use local suppliers where possible.
• Annually review this policy to ensure that it is in accordance with the principles stated in our Sustainable Development Policy. We will regularly review and report (internally and externally) on our progress against this policy.