We aim to procure all goods and services responsibly and to work with companies in our supply chain to improve their sustainability performance.

We spend a significant amount each year on products and services and have a huge opportunity to contribute to the sustainability of our business and our supply chain by making sure these are sourced, manufactured and traded in a socially and environmentally responsible manner. This means we must understand and manage the potential risks in our supply chain.

Our supply chain plays an essential role in the delivery of our sustainability strategy, so it is important to work with suppliers to help them make continuous improvements.

To support this we have developed and embedded a Sustainability Heat Map tool, which is used to identify sustainability risks in each of the 290 spend categories that the Procurement team manage. With such diverse spend, our Heat Map tool enables us to focus and tailor our actions specific to the different commodities. The Heat Map process is supported by a number of tools to help develop risk mitigation strategies across the categories. These include recognition for industry accreditation such as Avetta and Achilles BuildingConfidence.

We collaborate with our suppliers to develop new ways of working that make us more efficient and help them to meet their own sustainability targets. This includes work with the Supply Chain Sustainability School, of which Tarmac is a partner. The Supply Chain Sustainability School is a collaborative construction sector initiative designed to provide free of charge sustainability awareness and training materials to suppliers in the industry. Tarmac achieved gold member status in 2015, and throughout 2016 has developed this relationship further with particular focus on upskilling our procurement professionals in the business using the resources available within the School. By the end of 2016, the Tarmac procurement team had achieved 293 hours of further learning by completing eModule Assessments provided by the school. These eModules cover various topics on the core aspects of sustainability as well as specialist areas such as understanding BES 6001 the framework standard for Responsible Sourcing of Construction Products.

In 2016 all of our products were certified as ‘excellent’ against BES 6001 the framework standard for the Responsible Sourcing of Construction Products. This is a major achievement and we believe we are the first company in our sector to achieve this across the full product range. This has been a cross business team effort and means we have achieved one of our main targets for all products to be rated as ‘excellent’ by the end of 2016. The BES 6001 standard provides a way of assessing the systems a company has in place to ensure that materials are sourced, manufactured responsibly and traceable.

Tarmac uses BS 8903 Principles and framework for Procuring Sustainably as a guide to identifying strong and weak areas in our own procurement procedures and processes. This enables us to plan and focus on areas of improvement that maximise value to the business, our customers, and our stakeholders.

This approach has provided us with the assurance that we are making gains in demonstrating responsible procurement principles through the tools we have developed and started to incorporate. In 2017 we will focus on refining these tools and applying them consistently across all the different categories that we operate in. We also plan to align our procurement processes to ISO 20400 the new international standard for sustainable procurement.

The Modern Slavery Act was introduced in the UK in 2015. This important legislation requires businesses to make public the steps being taken to ensure that slavery and human trafficking do not exist in the supply chain. As a responsible and ethical business Tarmac fully support all efforts to combat any abuse of human rights. Throughout 2016 we have continued to raise awareness amongst our employees and customer base, while engaging with our supply chain to help manage the inherent risk. Read our Modern Slavery Statement

Read our case study: Modern Slavery in the Supply Chain

In 2017 we are taking steps to further enhance our responsible procurement practices by developing some of the key tools for identifying and mitigating risk within our supply chain, reviewing our commodity / supply chain Heat Map, implementing procurement stage gate reviews (a go/no decision review), supporting supplier relationship management and continuing to strive for procurement excellence.