If you supply the NHS, or you are thinking about it, there is a requirement you cannot design around anymore.

Since 6 April 2026, every supplier submitting a tender through NHS Supply Chain has had to hold an Evergreen Sustainable Supplier Assessment at Level 1 by the time the tender closes. It is a prerequisite, not a scored criterion you either have it or your bid does not qualify. There is no stated exemption for small suppliers.

This is what Level 1 involves, what comes after it, and where the work is.

What Evergreen is

Evergreen is the NHS’s sustainable supplier assessment. It has four maturity levels, from a basic commitment through to independently validated performance. It applies to any supplier providing, or planning to provide, goods or services to the NHS.

It sits alongside the separate carbon reduction plan requirements for NHS procurement, which have been in place since April 2023 for contracts of £5m a year or more, and since April 2024 for all new procurements at a tiered level.

What Level 1 requires

Requirement	What it means in practice
A commitment to UK net zero by 2050	A stated, public commitment. It has to be real, but it does not have to be sophisticated.
A Carbon Reduction Plan compliant with PPN 006	Published prominently on a UK website. Covers Scope 1, Scope 2 and five specified Scope 3 categories. Reviewed annually within six months of your financial year end.
UK Scope 1, Scope 2 and a subset of Scope 3 reporting	Reported in CO2 equivalent across the seven Kyoto gases. For most manufacturers, Scope 1 comes from fuel invoices and Scope 2 from electricity bills.

The five Scope 3 categories PPN 006 requires are upstream transportation and distribution, waste generated in operations, business travel, employee commuting, and downstream transportation and distribution. Not all fifteen categories. Five.

The realistic assessment: for a manufacturer with tidy records, Level 1 is a few days of work, not a project. The hard part is not the calculation. It is having something meaningful to put in the reduction plan and being able to show next year that it happened.

What comes after Level 1

Level 1 is the floor, and the floor is rising. The NHS net zero supplier roadmap sets out what follows:

Date	What suppliers must do
April 2027	Report all relevant global Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions, with publicly disclosed targets and carbon reduction plans.
April 2028	Provide product-level carbon foot printing for individual products supplied to the NHS.
2030	Only suppliers who can demonstrate progress  through published progress reports and continued emissions reporting  will qualify for NHS contracts.

Levels 2 to 4 of Evergreen escalate in step with that: global scope rather than UK only, all relevant Scope 3 categories, and independent validation from Level 3 upwards.

Where the work is

Producing a first set of numbers is manageable. Sustaining them is where suppliers come unstuck, for two reasons.

One. The plan must have something in it

A carbon reduction plan that says “we intend to reduce our emissions” is a plan in the same way that a shopping list with nothing on it is a shopping list. Reviewers can tell. And in April 2027 the requirement becomes publicly disclosed targets, which means the plan gets read by more people than the procurement officer.

Two. The data must be repeatable

If your first submission was estimated by a consultant from floor area and headcount, your second submission will be estimated the same way and will look identical. The roadmap explicitly moves towards demonstrating progress, and progress must be measured to be demonstrated.

For most manufacturers, the single largest gap is Scope 2 below the meter. You know the site total. You do not know what the offices, the quality lab, the canteen, the welfare block, the gatehouse and the despatch office use, or what is plugged in around the floor. In a typical commercial building around 40% of energy goes through the sockets and roughly half of that is wasted and none of it is measured.

An NHS example

Royal Cornwall used smart sockets to find wasted plug power and switch it off automatically, with reporting that gave measured consumption and carbon by area rather than a single figure from a bill.

That is the shape of the thing the roadmap is asking suppliers to be able to do: measure, act, and show the effect. It happens to also cut the electricity bill, with typical payback across a deployment under ten months.

What to do this quarter

1. Check whether you already have Evergreen Level 1. If you have tendered through NHS Supply Chain since April 2026, somebody in your business has probably had to deal with it.
2. Publish a PPN 006-compliant Carbon Reduction Plan on your website if you do not already have one and diarise the annual review.
3. Get Scope 1 and 2 from your invoices using the published government conversion factors. It is arithmetic.
4. Pick three actions you will genuinely do and put them in the plan with dates. Reducing wasted plug power is a good first one because it is cheap, fast and measurable.
5. Start measuring now, not in 2027. The evidence you will need then is the data you collect between now and then.

The honest summary

Evergreen Level 1 is not difficult. It is a commitment, a published plan and two sets of numbers you can get from your own invoices.

What it is, is the beginning. The roadmap goes to full scope reporting in 2027, product foot printing in 2028 and demonstrated progress by 2030. Suppliers who start measuring properly this year will find each of those a formality. Suppliers who estimate their way through Level 1 will be doing the same work again, harder, every year.

If you would like to know which parts of your Scope 2 you could measure rather than estimate, we will size it for you free and if it is not worth doing at your site, we will say so.

Frequently asked questions

Mark this section up with FAQPage schema.

Is Evergreen mandatory for NHS suppliers?

From 6 April 2026, all suppliers submitting tenders through NHS Supply Chain must have achieved Evergreen Level 1 at the point the tender closes. It is a prerequisite for bidding rather than something scored in the evaluation.

Is there an exemption for small businesses?

No exemption is stated. The assessment applies to any supplier providing or planning to provide goods or services to the NHS, regardless of size.

What is the difference between Evergreen and a Carbon Reduction Plan?

A Carbon Reduction Plan is a published document required under PPN 006 for major government contracts. Evergreen is the NHS’s wider supplier assessment, and a PPN 006-compliant Carbon Reduction Plan is one of the things Level 1 requires you to have.

Which Scope 3 categories does a PPN 006 plan have to cover?

Five: upstream transportation and distribution, waste generated in operations, business travel, employee commuting, and downstream transportation and distribution.

What happens in April 2027 and April 2028?

From April 2027 the NHS supplier roadmap requires reporting of all relevant global Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions with publicly disclosed targets and carbon reduction plans. From April 2028 it requires product-level carbon foot printing for individual products supplied to the NHS.

 

Kee Business Services  ·  km@kbs.team  ·  Manchester, UK  ·  Keeping promises. Keeping costs under control