19 Aug. 2025: The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is conducting an update to the Government Buying Standards (GBS) - these set mandatory minimum and best practice requirements for sustainable central Government procurement, there is mandatory compliance for central Government departments and suggested use for the wider public sector.

The GBS update covers 11 categories of procurement spend. These are Artificial Intelligence, Appliances, Buildings, Cloud and Data Centre Services, Fleet, Furniture, Horticulture, ICT Hardware, Paper, Software and Applications, and Textiles.

As part of the update, Defra are conducting a series of public webinars on the GBS categories over September. These webinars will be accompanied by a survey, which we are inviting attendees to respond to, to provide feedback on the proposed updates.

The update to the Paper and Paper Products GBS has a focus on circular economy, addressing the environmental impacts of public procurement through ‘buy better, use better and use longer’ requirements, and ecolabels.

The survey is open from Monday 11th August to Monday 6th October 2025. Within this link Government Buying Standards, there is a link to the survey and contained within that is the link to the webinar timetable which you can register for any of the upcoming webinars.

Wednesday 3rd September 13:00-14:00: Paper  https://events.teams.microsoft.com/event/579bdf52-34d3-4f4b-8d0f-0bec6b6b517a@770a2450-0227-4c62-90c7-4e38537f1102