Pilot 4 Locale: Why UK?

  • Pioneer: The NHS was among the first British public bodies to make carbon reporting a legal requirement throughout its supply chain. From April 2023, all contracts over £5M required a Carbon Reduction Plan as a contractual/​tender requirement. From April 2024, every single supplier to the NHS or related Social Services required a CRP.
  • Scale: With 1.7 million employees, the UK’s National Health Service is not only the UK’s biggest employer (1.7million staff), but the 5th biggest in the world (behind Walmart, McDonalds, China Railways and the Chinese police).

Pilot 4 Scope: Why Health Care?

  • Structure: The NHS has a clear hierarchy and supply chain, conveniently clearly divided into health trusts, hospitals, clinics etc. Systems like this facilitate carbon accounting, as it’s relatively clear whose carbon liabilities should be allocated where, to avoid double-counting. Every supplier’s carbon footprint constitutes part of their customer’s Scope 3, so a combination of the NHS’s closed-system clarity and massive scale makes it an ideal case study.
  • Scale: NHS suppliers could fall under Pilot 1 (UK/​SMEs) or Pilot 5 (UK/​Public Sector), but the fact that the NHS’s £177 Billion annual budget accounts for 10% of the UK’s entire GDP, together with the fact that it falls under a single funder, deserves its own Pilot.
  • Model: OECD countries spend an average of around 10% of GDP on health care. None is more concentrated into a single body as the UK’s, but an NHS pilot should prove of value to other health care systems with similar carbon reporting regulation.

Pilot 4 Methods: How to calculate Health Care footprints accurately?

  • Methodology: See Through Carbon describes an overview of the basic carbon accounting methodologies in a separate article. As each Pilot progresses, the website will update and add more specifics.
  • For Pilot 4: STC is following the GHGP carbon footprint protocol specified in the UK Government’s Carbon Reduction Plan.
  • Dynamic improvement: As a free, open, transparent ecosystem, See Through Carbon makes all its methodology public, publishes correspondence with regulators regarding compliance, and encourages public scrutiny. The Expert Panel determining STC methodology is motivated by accuracy, not commercial concerns about arriving at ​‘acceptable’ outcomes. This enables STC to incorporate best practice, and new research, giving Pilot participants confidence they’re ​‘ahead of the game’ when it comes to carbon reporting.

Pilot 4 Partners: Potential Participation Entities

  • Comprehensive: The interlinked nature of carbon reporting, with every supplier and end user part of any customer’s Scope 3 calculation, means that in principle it doesn’t matter where to start, i.e. which entity, or connected entities, should make the initial application. Accurate calculation of any one entity’s Scope 3 emissions requires the accurate calculation of all parts of its upstream and downstream suppliers/​customers.
  • Consistency: Ultimately, all levels and strands of any hierarchy are interconnected, and all will benefit from consistently applying the same methodology.

Having said this, Pilot 4 applicants might want to consider how best to administer the Pilot to suit the UK health sector Some options:
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  • Trusts: the NHS has 215 Trusts, overseeing particular geographical locales. As these don’t overlap, this creates a convenient discrete scope, but maybe impractically big for Pilot purposes.
  • Hospitals: There are around 1,150 hospitals in the NHS network. These are still huge and complex, with thousands of SMEs in their supply chain.
  • Clinics: There are around 6,500 NHS clinics. This may be the best practical scale for Pilot purposes.
  • Trade Associations: care home and home care social services fall under the same regulator (the Care Quality Commission), so have established local and sectoral networks, each with its own emissions reporting and reduction requirements. Apart from complying with the Carbon Reduction Plan requirements, See Through Carbon ecosystem’s open database uniquely facilitates generating quick, convenient, free, accurate, verifiable data to quantify progress, motivate members, apply for government subsidies/​funding etc..
  • Supply chains: Many SMEs will supply many different parts of the NHS (e.g. a PPE supplier invoicing Trusts, Hospitals, Clinics, care homes, home care providers etc.). Another unique feature of See Through Carbon’s ecosystem is its capacity to automatically aggregate supply chain data for Scope 3 reporting as a trusted 3rd party that will not reveal commercially sensitive information (i.e. any user’s degree of dependence on its customers/​suppliers). This information is required in order to assign, say, a ​‘fair’ proportion of a supplier’s carbon footprint to its customers on a revenue basis, but SMEs are understandably reluctant to report such data directly. Most carbon reporting regulation requires big businesses to use 3rd-party data collectors for precisely this reason.