Last updated: September 2026, reflecting the procurement landscape after the GCA merger and ahead of PPN 026's 2027 scoring changes.
If you sell to government and you've tried to open a Crown Commercial Service page recently, you may have noticed it doesn't exist any more. It redirects. Since 1 April 2026, Crown Commercial Service and the Cabinet Office's central commercial teams have been folded into a single new body, the Government Commercial Agency (GCA). If you bookmarked a CCS carbon guidance page, it now lives under a gca.gov.uk address.
That's a bigger reshuffle than it sounds. The GCA now sits across roughly £400 billion of annual public sector spending and covers everything CCS used to run, plus the commercial expertise that previously sat inside the Cabinet Office. For a supplier chasing a Carbon Reduction Plan (CRP) through a live bid, the practical question is simple: does any of this change what you actually have to submit?
What moved, and what didn't
The GCA's own launch announcement is blunt about it: "for now, everything stays the same. Our frameworks are unchanged, as are any call-offs and contracts that have been let within that framework." That's a statement about continuity of contracts and frameworks, not a comment on carbon policy specifically, but it lines up with what's actually happened to the guidance itself.
The carbon net zero guidance now hosted on gca.gov.uk repeats the same threshold and structure that's applied since PPN 06/21 first landed in 2021: a compliant plan is required for contracts worth more than £5 million a year including VAT, and it has to show how you'll hit Scope 1 and 2 emissions targets along with your Scope 3 position. That requirement formally applies to central government departments, their executive agencies, and non-departmental public bodies; local authorities and other public sector organisations can adopt it voluntarily, but they aren't mandated to. Nothing in the reorganisation touched the underlying rule, which still sits in PPN 006's technical standard. That standard is specific: you report all Scope 1 and 2 emissions plus five defined Scope 3 categories (upstream transport, waste, business travel, employee commuting and downstream transport), commit to net zero by 2050 at the latest, get the plan approved by your board or LLP members with named sign-off, publish it prominently on your UK website, and refresh it within six months of your financial year end. None of that has a GCA-shaped asterisk next to it.
A busier year than usual for procurement machinery
The GCA merger isn't the only structural change suppliers have had to track in 2026. In August, under the Burnham government, the Cabinet Office published PPN 026, a rewritten Social Value Model that drops several of the broader environmental and social criteria from the old scoring framework in favour of a narrower jobs-and-skills model. From January 2027, that model carries a minimum 10% weighting on contracts up to £5 million and 20% above that, for procurements run by central government departments and their agencies.
It's worth being precise about what PPN 026 actually touches, because it's easy to conflate the two. It changes how social value is scored inside the evaluation. It applies to procurements starting from 1 January 2027, and only to contracts of £1 million or more run by in-scope central government bodies. For suppliers already sitting on frameworks, that start date is keyed to the call-off, not the framework's original award date, so a call-off commenced on or after 1 January 2027 falls under the new rules even on an older framework. Contracts worth £5 million or more also have to carry at least one social value KPI, reported annually for the life of the contract. It says nothing about the Carbon Reduction Plan gate, which sits earlier in the process as a condition of participation, not a scored criterion. Miss a compliant CRP on a contract over the £5 million threshold and you're excluded before anyone gets to scoring, PPN 026 or otherwise.
So two separate things have happened to procurement this year: who runs it, with CCS and the Cabinet Office's commercial function combining into the GCA, and how bids get scored, with PPN 026 narrowing social value to jobs and skills from 2027. Both are real changes. Neither one has loosened, delayed, or replaced the requirement to have a compliant CRP in place if you're bidding above £5 million.
What this means if you're mid-bid
Practically, there are two things worth doing. First, if any of your bid templates, boilerplate, or internal guidance link out to the old crowncommercial.gov.uk carbon pages, update them, since some of those links will now bounce through a redirect rather than land directly, and a broken reference in a bid document doesn't inspire confidence in an evaluator. Second, don't read the reorganisation as a signal that carbon requirements are being deprioritised alongside the wider social value trim. The two policy areas are run separately, and PPN 006 hasn't been touched by either the machinery change or the scoring change.
If your CRP is overdue for its annual refresh or you're building one from scratch for the first time, that's the actual task in front of you, regardless of which agency's letterhead the guidance sits under. Tools like CarbonVerified build the plan to the current PPN 006 technical standard directly, so a change of department name doesn't mean re-checking the requirements from scratch.
