DEFRA Posted 01/09/2015

Assurance schemes to improve food procurement

A Plan for Public Procurement: Food and Catering Services aims to improve public sector procurement and support UK producers in obtaining more of the benefit of the public procurement market. The Plan provides a toolkit to enable a simpler and more consistent approach to procurement. This includes a Balanced Scorecard which sets out a clear range of criteria to help both those who buy food and catering services for the public sector and their potential suppliers.

This guidance will help caterers understand how assurance schemes can enable them to meet the criteria of the Balanced Scorecard. It does not rank the different assurance schemes against each other and is based on self-assessment by the assurance schemes of the match between their scheme and the requirements of the Balanced Scorecard. [ Defra ]