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SEKO Logistics UK & Ireland has confirmed the submission of its FY26 Communication on Progress (CoP) to the UN Global Compact (UNGC), the annual disclosure required of all active UNGC participants. The filing sets out the company’s progress against the UNGC’s Ten Principles across human rights, labour, environment and anti-corruption. SEKO’s active status and filing history are publicly viewable via its UNGC participant record; as with all new submissions, the CoP document itself is added to the UNGC’s public library once indexing is complete.
The distinction matters to procurement teams increasingly asked to justify their supplier choices to investors, regulators and their own customers. Independent ratings, such as EcoVadis, benchmark a company’s practices against its peers, but the underlying scorecards are not made fully public. A Communication on Progress works differently: once indexed, it sits on the UNGC’s public library for anyone, including a prospective client’s procurement or ESG team, to read directly rather than take on trust.
Paul Lockwood, Managing Director, SEKO Logistics UK & Ireland added, “There’s a real difference between telling a client you’re sustainable and giving them a document they can go and check for themselves. That’s what this filing is. It’s not a marketing claim, it’s a public record we’re accountable to, and we’d rather be judged against that than against our own description of progress.”
Why public disclosure is becoming a procurement issue
Under PPN 006, UK government suppliers bidding for contracts above £5m must publish a Carbon Reduction Plan covering Scope 1, 2 and relevant Scope 3 emissions. Private sector buyers are moving in the same direction, with several major retailers and manufacturers now building emissions and governance disclosures into supplier scoring criteria rather than treating them as background information.
UNGC participation carries a compliance consequence that reinforces this: companies that fail to submit a Communication on Progress within the required window are delisted from the initiative altogether. That gives the filing a verification value that a voluntary sustainability statement does not have; it is a commitment the company is contractually obliged to evidence annually, in public, or lose its standing.
Part of a wider accreditation picture
The CoP filing follows SEKO UK & Ireland’s EcoVadis Gold status, awarded to companies in the top 5% of all organisations assessed globally, and its Living Wage Employer accreditation. Taken together, the three sit across different types of scrutiny: EcoVadis is a comparative, evidence-based assessment against other companies; Living Wage accreditation confirms a specific labour standard; and the UNGC CoP is a public account of progress the company must maintain to remain a participant in good standing.
For retail and manufacturing clients under their own pressure to evidence Scope 3 performance, that combination is intended to reduce the burden of due diligence: rather than relying solely on a supplier’s own claims, buyers can cross-reference independent, public and third-party sources side by side.
What this means for procurement teams
As Scope 3 reporting obligations tighten and supplier due diligence becomes more formalised, the ability to point to a public record, rather than a private assurance, is likely to carry increasing weight in tender processes. Logistics providers unable to produce equivalent documentation may find themselves at a structural disadvantage with buyers who are themselves required to show their own supply chain evidence.
Image source: elements.envato.com
