Carbon Reduction Plan (PPN 006): What UK Suppliers Must Include and Update Every Year

Many small and medium firms wrote a Carbon Reduction Plan for one tender, published the PDF and never looked at it again. When we checked plans published by UK suppliers in October 2026, we found plans whose latest figures were for 2023-24, and one whose “current year” table still read “not yet due for reporting” more than two years later. A buyer reading that on your next bid sees a plan that has not been kept. This guide explains what the plan must contain, who needs one, and how to keep it up to date without much work.

Who needs a Carbon Reduction Plan?

You need one if you bid for a contract that falls under PPN 006. That means all three of these apply:

There is no exemption for small firms. A 30-person company bidding for a £6 million-a-year contract needs a plan just like a large one. Councils and housing associations are not covered by PPN 006 itself, but many now ask for the same document in their own tenders. The NHS has its own requirements built on PPN 006, and they change on 1 April 2027: see the 2027 NHS Carbon Reduction Plan requirements.

What must a Carbon Reduction Plan include?

The government publishes a template and a technical reporting standard. The plan is short, often three to five pages, and follows the same headings every time:

Emissions must cover the seven greenhouse gases of the Kyoto Protocol, reported together as CO₂ equivalent, and should be calculated with the UK Government’s greenhouse gas conversion factors following the GHG Protocol.

Which Scope 3 emissions are required?

You do not need your whole supply chain. The reporting standard asks for five of the fifteen Scope 3 categories, the ones a supplier can measure from its own records:

For an office-based business, categories 4 and 9 are often zero or close to it, and the plan can say so. For a full list of the fifteen categories with examples, see Scope 3 emissions explained.

How often must it be updated?

The guidance says the plan should be updated at least annually and stay published and clearly signposted on your UK website. In practice, that means adding each new year’s figures once your financial year closes, refreshing the list of completed projects, and signing it off again. If your plan still shows only a baseline year from 2022, or a current year marked “not yet due”, it is out of date.

A Carbon Reduction Plan is not a one-off tender document. It is a yearly report that buyers can check on your website at any time.

Common mistakes we see

Most problems are small and easy to fix. The figures are old, because nobody owns the update. The “current year” section is left blank or says “not yet due”. One of the five Scope 3 categories is missing with no explanation. Totals do not add up, or the baseline and current tables use different scopes, so the reduction looks bigger or smaller than it is. The plan promises something by a date (“we will measure Scope 3 by end 2025”) and the next version never appears. The PDF is buried in a document library instead of being easy to find. And the sign-off is missing or undated. Any of these can raise questions from an evaluator, and some buyers treat a missing or non-compliant plan as a fail at the selection stage.

How to update your plan in five steps

Step 1: collect one full year of data, usually your last financial year: electricity and gas bills (or your landlord’s recharges), fuel cards and company car mileage, waste reports, travel expenses and a staff commuting survey. Step 2: convert each item into tonnes CO₂e using the current UK Government conversion factors. The free GHG inventory template for Excel does the sums, and the business carbon footprint calculator gives a quick first estimate. Step 3: add the new year to the “current emissions” table and keep the baseline unchanged, unless your business has changed a lot (for example after an acquisition), in which case recalculate the baseline and explain why. Step 4: update the completed and planned projects, and check the reduction projection still makes sense. Step 5: have a director sign and date it, publish it in a clearly labelled place on your website, and replace the old file.

For most small office-based firms this is a day or two of work once the data is in hand. To do it yourself, the Carbon Reduction Plan template follows the government headings with guidance and worked figures. If you would rather hand it over, we prepare and update Carbon Reduction Plans for small firms.