Francis Noel Duffy (Dublin South West, Green Party)
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94. To ask the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform the position regarding switching to green procurement in the Office of Government Procurement and the progress to date; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [11399/22]

Michael McGrath (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail)
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In 2019, my Department published Circular 20/2019: Promoting the use of Environmental and Social Considerations in Public Procurement. This instructs Departments to consider using green criteria in their procurements, and to include green considerations in the planning and reporting cycles. The Office of Government Procurement (OGP) fully embraces switching to green procurement. A key objective in the OGP's Statement of Strategy is enabling better and more transparent public procurement that is socially, environmentally, and economically sustainable through guidance, advisory services, and training. This includes embedding strategic public procurement, which includes green and social considerations, in procurement policy and in the OGP’s next generation procurement solutions.

The Strategic Procurement Advisory Group, chaired by the OGP, promotes the incorporation of strategic considerations into public procurement projects. In 2021, the OGP and the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications established and co-chair an Environmental subgroup to facilitate more detailed, technical, discussion of issues relating to green public procurement (GPP) and broader sustainability and climate considerations in public procurement.

Further to ongoing engagement by OGP officials in recent years in explaining and promoting green public procurement, the OGP recently hosted a Conference ‘Go Green: From Policy to Practice’, which highlighted examples of the transition to green procurement both within the OGP and across a number of public sector bodies.

The line with the Programme for Government the OGP and its partner Central Purchasing Bodies (CPBs) have been reviewing all central purchasing arrangements to identify opportunities to include green considerations. 165 central arrangements had been updated to include green criteria by the end of 2021. A further 41 arrangements will be updated to include green criteria this year and next.