How Midland Civil Groundworks Won a Government Contract with a Carbon Reduction Plan

About Midland Civil Groundworks

Midland Civil Groundworks Ltd is a 14-person groundworks and civil engineering subcontractor based in Coventry, West Midlands. The company handles drainage, foundations, and ground preparation for house builders and housing associations across the Midlands. It is a tightly run operation — experienced site teams, a small management office, and a director, James, who handles most of the business development himself.

The Challenge: A Compliance Requirement They Had Not Seen Before

In early 2024, James received an invitation to tender for a subcontract package worth £800,000 on a regional housing framework. The framework itself was valued above the £5 million threshold that triggers PPN 06/21 — the Cabinet Office procurement policy note that requires suppliers to hold a published Carbon Reduction Plan as a condition of bidding.

The requirement was clear: without a Carbon Reduction Plan (CRP) compliant with PPN 06/21, the submission would be disqualified at the gateway stage. No exceptions.

James had heard of net zero in passing. He had not heard of PPN 006. He had certainly never produced a CRP. He had two weeks before the tender deadline.

The First Attempt: A Spreadsheet and Two Wasted Days

The GOV.UK guidance pointed him to a template spreadsheet. He downloaded it and spent the better part of two days working through it — gathering electricity bills, diesel receipts, and employee travel estimates, trying to apply DESNZ conversion factors to calculate Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions in line with the GHG Protocol reporting framework.

The spreadsheet produced numbers. But the output was not formatted to the standard the tender required. There was no declaration page, no sign-off structure, and no indication of how the document should be published. James knew the numbers were roughly right, but he had no confidence the document would pass a compliance check. He scrapped it and started looking for a different approach.

Finding CarbonVerified

A Google search for “PPN 006 Carbon Reduction Plan template” returned CarbonVerified.uk near the top of the results. James clicked through, read the page, and signed up for the free tier the same afternoon.

The platform walked him through data entry section by section — Scope 1 (the company's diesel plant and company vehicles), Scope 2 (office electricity), and a simplified Scope 3 estimate covering business travel and purchased goods. The interface prompted him for the data it needed and applied the correct DESNZ emission factors automatically. He did not need to look up a single conversion figure.

He completed data entry in a single sitting. Two hours, start to finish.

When he saw the preview of the generated CRP — structured, declaration included, formatted to the PPN 06/21 standard — he upgraded to the Pro plan at £29 for the month. The report downloaded as a PDF within seconds. He published it to the company website that evening.

Total cost: one month's Pro subscription. Total time from signing up to published CRP: under a week.

The Outcome

Midland Civil Groundworks submitted the tender with the CRP attached and the published URL referenced in the compliance section. The bid passed the gateway check. Six weeks later, James received confirmation that the company had been awarded the package.

The £800,000 contract was the largest single framework award the business had secured.

James now logs into CarbonVerified each quarter to update the company's activity data. He keeps the CRP current so that the next tender — whenever it arrives — does not create a two-week scramble.