Are £199 CRP generators accepted by procurement teams?

When a bid reaches the selection stage, the assessor works from a checklist derived from the technical standard published alongside the policy by the Government Commercial Agency (GCA, formerly Crown Commercial Service). According to the PPN 006 guidance on GOV.UK and the accompanying GCA technical standard, a compliant Carbon Reduction Plan must:

• Follow the structure of the official template
• Report Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions in full, plus the five mandatory Scope 3 categories
• Use GHG Protocol methodology and current DEFRA conversion factors
• State a clear commitment to achieving Net Zero by 2050
• Carry sign-off by a director or equivalent
• Be published on the supplier's website

Every item on that list describes the document, not its origin. Nothing in the standard asks who drafted it. The same criteria apply to NHS procurements, where NHS England's Greener NHS programme aligns its supplier requirements with PPN 006. For a fuller walk-through of the policy itself, see our PPN 006 explained guide.

Low-cost plans that fail almost never fail because they were cheap — they fail because they are incomplete. Reading the GCA technical standard against the plans that get bounced, the same handful of gaps come up again and again:

• Missing Scope 3 categories. The standard names five that are mandatory; a plan reporting only one or two is non-compliant on its face.
• Wrong template structure. If sections are missing or reordered so an assessor cannot tick them off against the template, the plan reads as incomplete.
• No baseline year. Without a stated baseline there is nothing to measure future reductions against, so the Net Zero commitment cannot be assessed.
• No director sign-off. The standard requires board-level or director sign-off; an unsigned plan is treated as a draft.
• Not published. A plan sitting on a hard drive does not satisfy the requirement to publish it on the supplier's website and provide the URL in the bid.

None of these are problems of authorship or price — they are problems of content and process. A consultant-written plan with the same gaps would be rejected just as fast. The fix is to close every gap, whoever produces the document.

Because the failure modes are specific and repeatable, they can be designed out. CarbonPass maps a safeguard to each one, so the common reasons a cheap plan gets rejected simply cannot occur in the output:

The methodology behind the numbers uses GHG Protocol and current DEFRA factors, applied automatically from your bills, so the calculation itself is not a place where a cheap plan can quietly go wrong. If you are weighing the options, our CRP cost guide compares DIY, software and consultancy side by side, and our consultant vs software decision guide helps you pick honestly between the two paid routes.

Software closes the structural gaps; the optional £100 Completion Check adds a human read before you submit. A person reviews the finished plan and confirms four things:

• Every PPN 006 section required by the template is present
• The figures are internally consistent — totals reconcile and Scope subtotals add up
• The methodology is declared, naming GHG Protocol and the DEFRA factors used
• The plan is publish-ready, with a director sign-off block and nothing left as a placeholder

It is important to be precise about what this is not. The Completion Check is a completeness review, not a certification, not an independent audit, and not a guarantee that your bid will be awarded — award decisions rest with the buyer against the whole tender, not just the CRP. What it does is give you a second pair of eyes so that the plan you publish and link in your submission is complete against the standard. For the template itself, see our Carbon Reduction Plan template guide.

Will a procurement team reject my CRP because I used software?

No. Assessors check the content of your Carbon Reduction Plan against the PPN 006 technical standard, not who or what produced it. There is nothing in the standard that requires a plan to be written by a consultant, and no field on the assessment checklist asks about authorship. A software-generated plan that contains every required section is treated identically to one drafted by hand.

What makes a CRP non-compliant?

The common failure modes are all about missing content: fewer than the five mandatory Scope 3 categories, a structure that does not follow the official template, no stated baseline year, no director-level sign-off, and — surprisingly often — a plan that was never actually published on the supplier’s website. Any one of these can see a plan rejected at the selection stage regardless of how it was produced.

Is a software-generated CRP as valid as a consultant-written one?

Yes, provided it meets the PPN 006 content criteria: the official template structure, Scope 1, 2 and the five required Scope 3 categories, GHG Protocol methodology with current DEFRA factors, a Net Zero by 2050 commitment, director sign-off and website publication. CarbonPass is built to satisfy every one of these, so its output stands on the same footing as a consultant’s document.

What does the Completion Check actually do?

The £100 Completion Check is a human completeness review. A person confirms that every PPN 006 section is present, that the figures are internally consistent, that the methodology is declared, and that the plan is ready to publish. It is not a certification, an audit, or a guarantee that you will win a contract — it is a second pair of eyes before you submit.