Sustainable Procurement Strategy

1. Purpose and scope

This strategy applies to everything Featherstone Safety Ltd buys: cloud infrastructure and software, professional services, subcontracted consultancy and development, IT equipment and consumables.

It is written to the scale of the business. We are a single-director company with no employees, incorporated on 19 August 2026, and our annual procurement spend is small. A strategy that described supplier audit programmes and weighted ESG scorecards would not survive contact with reality, so this one describes what we can genuinely do and apply.

2. Our objectives

• Buy less, and buy things that last longer, before buying better.
• Choose suppliers whose environmental and labour standards we would be content to have associated with our customers.
• Keep data and services within the UK and EEA where there is a choice.
• Support small and medium-sized suppliers where they can meet the requirement.
• Pay suppliers on time.
• Ensure nothing we buy is tainted by modern slavery, forced labour or child labour.

3. How we categorise what we buy

Proportionality matters more than process for a business our size, so we apply three levels.

4. What we assess

Before engaging a significant supplier, and when reviewing one, we consider:

• Environmental — whether the supplier has an environmental policy, any carbon commitment or reporting, and where their operations and data centres are located.
• Labour and human rights — whether the supplier complies with the Modern Slavery Act 2015, pays at or above statutory minimums, and publishes a modern slavery statement where required to.
• Governance and ethics — anti-bribery, tax compliance, data protection, and any regulatory action against them.
• Health and safety — for any subcontractor attending a customer site, competence, insurance and safe systems of work.
• Resilience — whether a failure of that supplier would take our service down, and what the alternative is.

Where a supplier is a small business without formal policies, we do not exclude them for that reason. We ask how they handle the substance, and we record the answer. Requiring formal documentation from every supplier would exclude exactly the small businesses we say we want to support.

5. What we require in our terms

Where we engage a supplier or subcontractor on our own terms, those terms require compliance with:

• the Modern Slavery Act 2015 and the supplier requirements in our Modern Slavery Policy;
• the Bribery Act 2010 and our Anti-Bribery and Corruption Policy;
• applicable tax law, with a prohibition on facilitating tax evasion;
• applicable environmental legislation;
• applicable employment, working time and equality legislation; and
• applicable data protection law, where personal data is involved.

Breach of these requirements is a material breach of the engagement and we may terminate with immediate effect.

Where we contract on a large platform supplier’s standard terms — as is the case with our cloud, payment and email providers — we cannot impose our terms on them. We assess their published position instead, and we say so rather than implying otherwise.

6. Supporting small and diverse suppliers

We are a micro business ourselves, and most of what we buy outside the large platforms is bought from other small businesses. We do not set minimum turnover, insurance or certification requirements beyond what the work genuinely needs, because those requirements are the most common reason small and diverse suppliers are shut out of supply chains.

We pay small suppliers to agreed terms and do not use payment delay as working capital.

We do not currently measure the number of, or spend with, small and medium-sized enterprises or diverse suppliers in our supply chain, and we do not operate a supplier diversity programme. We are willing to provide our spend breakdown on request.

7. Review

The director owns this strategy and reviews it at least annually, alongside the Environmental and Sustainability Policy and the Carbon Reduction Plan. Supplier assessments are recorded and reviewed annually.

8. What we do not claim

We do not operate a formal supplier ESG maturity scoring model, we do not offer commercial incentives for ESG maturity, we do not require suppliers to set Science Based Targets or produce Carbon Reduction Plans, and we do not run a supplier audit programme. We hold no procurement certification.

These are the tools of an organisation with procurement staff and material buying power. We have neither, and claiming them would not survive a conversation with an evaluator.