The question arriving with tenders now is new and specific: what are your emissions, and what is your plan to cut them? It comes from two directions at once - government procurement rules with thresholds and deadlines, and commercial customers whose own carbon accounts need their hauliers’ numbers. Transport operators who can answer in the customer’s format win work; those who cannot are watching requirements harden from the sidelines.
The anchor policy is Procurement Policy Note 06/21: taking account of suppliers’ Net Zero Carbon Reduction Plans in the procurement of major government contracts. Its context is the UK’s statutory net zero target - the Climate Change Act 2008 amended in 2019 to require at least a 100% reduction in the net UK carbon account by 2050 - and its mechanism is procurement: in-scope organisations should apply the PPN when awarding contracts for goods, services or works with an estimated value above £5 million per year including VAT, under the Procurement Act 2023. The note reaches frameworks and dynamic markets too, where individual call-offs exceed the same £5 million threshold.
The practical meaning for hauliers: a Carbon Reduction Plan - emissions measured, reduction targets set, measures described - is increasingly a ticket to play for substantial public contracts, and the expectation diffuses outward from government into the commercial sector, whose own net zero commitments need supplier data.
Freight has its own measurement guidance: the official guide to measuring and reporting greenhouse gas emissions from freight transport operations. Its starting point is clarifying: the majority of freight’s GHG emissions come from fuel burned in the vehicles themselves - and the guidance is concerned with calculating and reporting exactly those direct vehicle emissions. Its second insight is the one customers actually need: operators calculate their total emissions and then allocate a fair share to each customer - the consignment-level number that lets a shipper put your trucks into their own carbon account.
That allocation is the commercial heart of the matter: the customer is not asking for your fleet’s total, they are asking for their slice - per consignment, per pallet, per lane - in a format their reporting accepts.
The pragmatic readiness path for a mid-size fleet: measure the fuel - the fleet’s diesel, gas and electricity by period, which is the data the freight guidance’s method runs on; convert to emissions using the standard factors, so the fleet has a defensible total; build the allocation - emissions per vehicle-mile or per consignment from the operational data; write the reduction plan - the measures already underway, with targets, in the customer’s or the CRP’s format; and keep it current - an annual refresh is the difference between a live credential and a stale PDF. The fleets that start with fuel data discover most of the system already exists: the fuel records were always the carbon records.
Carbon questions are now procurement questions: PPN 06/21 puts Carbon Reduction Plans into major government contracts above £5 million a year, and freight’s own guidance shows how to measure vehicle fuel emissions and allocate them to customers. Measure the fuel, calculate the total, allocate per consignment, write the plan - and the tender question becomes an answered one.
Carbon questions arrive in recognisable shapes, and reading them correctly saves the fleet from over- or under-answering. The tender box-tick - ‘describe your environmental policy’ - wants a competent, current document, not a dissertation. The CRP requirement - increasingly standard on the public-sector side under PPN 06/21 - wants the structured plan: measured emissions, targets, measures, sign-off. The data request - ‘provide emissions per consignment’ - wants the allocation method: fuel-based, per vehicle-mile, apportioned to the customer’s work in the format their reporting system accepts. And the partnership question - ‘what is your decarbonisation pathway’ - wants the honest roadmap: the fleet’s actual trials, the infrastructure plan, the vehicle replacement horizon. The fleets that answer each shape in its own format stop losing tenders to competitors who merely write better documents.
The carbon number’s credibility rests on plumbing the fleet mostly already has. Fuel purchase records - the bunker stock reconciliations and the fuel-card reports - give the litres; the telematics and the tachograph give the miles and the vehicle assignment; and the allocation to customers is an apportionment exercise over the same data: the customer’s consignments, the vehicles and routes that carried them, the share of the fuel. The fleets that find carbon reporting painful are usually discovering that these records live in three systems that have never met - so the practical first project is not the carbon methodology but the join: one report that puts fuel, miles and work in the same table. Once that table exists, the carbon arithmetic is an afternoon’s work that repeats monthly, and the tender question that used to trigger a week of panic becomes a report the office already runs.
The fleet that can produce its number per consignment discovers the question inverts: carbon stops being a form-filling burden and becomes a sales asset - the lane-level emissions figure offered before the customer asks, the year-on-year reduction shown in the tender, the alternative-mode comparison offered for the flexible work. Shippers under their own reporting pressure buy from the hauliers who make their reporting easier, and the gap between fleets that can answer and fleets that cannot is quietly becoming a gap in who gets invited to tender at all.