NHS Evergreen Assessment: No Level Awarded — what does it mean and what should you do next?

You have completed the NHS Evergreen Sustainable Supplier Assessment, submitted it through Atamis and received the result “No Level Awarded”.

What should you do now?

Start by finding out why you received that result. There may be a gap in your sustainability evidence, but that is not the only possibility. We have seen suppliers receive No Level Awarded because information was entered incorrectly in Atamis, and in one case because of a problem with the system itself.

That distinction matters. If your Carbon Reduction Plan is already suitable, rewriting it will not fix a missing link in Atamis. If your evidence and answers are both correct, changing either of them may not solve a system problem.

Here is how I would work through it.

What does “No Level Awarded” mean?

Evergreen gives suppliers one of four maturity levels. Level 1 is the starting point, with Levels 2, 3 and 4 progressively adding wider carbon reporting, stronger Net Zero requirements, independent validation and verification, modern slavery requirements, transparency and supply-chain action.

No Level Awarded means that your completed assessment has not resulted in one of those four levels.

It does not, by itself, tell you what went wrong.

What that result means commercially depends on the procurement route. NHS Supply Chain requires suppliers submitting tenders from 6 April 2026 to have achieved Level 1 by tender close. For NHS England medicines tenders, an active Evergreen submission is currently required, but suppliers are not excluded solely because the assessment has not achieved a level.

Check the procurement documents you are working to and confirm the Evergreen requirement that applies to that tender or framework.

Then look at the result itself.

1. Check your Carbon Reduction Plan

If you expected to achieve Level 1, this is the most useful place to start.

For the current Level 1 route, check that your Carbon Reduction Plan does all of the following:

• Published online. There should be a publicly accessible web page or document that you can link to from Evergreen.
• Current. The Carbon Reduction Plan information you rely on for Evergreen should have been published within the 12 months before you submit your assessment.
• Right business and boundary. Your Carbon Reduction Plan should relate to the supplier engaging with the NHS and cover its UK operations as a minimum. A wider global boundary is fine.
• Net Zero commitment. It should commit you to reaching Net Zero by 2050 or earlier, covering your UK operations as a minimum.
• Baseline and current reporting year. It should report both.
• Scope 1 emissions. For a typical smaller business, this could include fuel used for heating (for example, natural gas), fuel used in company-owned or controlled vehicles, fuel used in a generator and refrigerant leaks. In healthcare, directly released gases such as nitrous oxide can also fall within Scope 1.
• Scope 2 emissions. Most commonly, this will be the electricity you buy from the grid, although purchased heat, steam or cooling also belong here.
• At least the five Scope 3 categories currently included in the Carbon Reduction Plan standard:
  • upstream transportation and distribution (freight and storage);
  • waste generated in operations;
  • business travel;
  • employee commuting; and
  • downstream transportation and distribution (freight and storage).
• Emissions reported in tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO₂e). Calculations should be in line with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol.
• Carbon-reduction measures. Explain the measures you already have in place and the actions you are taking to reduce emissions further.
• Senior approval. Your Carbon Reduction Plan should show approval by your board or equivalent senior management body and be signed off by a director or equivalent senior person.

If you are working towards Evergreen Level 2, you need to go further and report all relevant Scope 3 emissions, not only these five categories.

If you can see that one of these things is missing, you have found something worth correcting.

If the Carbon Reduction Plan looks sound, check what you actually entered into Evergreen next.

Want someone to check the evidence before you change it?
Our NHS Evergreen Evidence Review & Action Plan reviews the evidence you already have against the level you are working towards and identifies what genuinely needs attention.

2. Check what you entered into Atamis

A suitable Carbon Reduction Plan can still result in No Level Awarded if the information entered into Evergreen does not show what the document contains.

Go back through the assessment and compare your answers with the evidence itself. Check that:

• the dates in Atamis match the dates in your documents;
• your answers refer to the same company and reporting boundary as your Carbon Reduction Plan;
• your emissions figures agree with the published evidence; and
• you have entered every requested link or piece of evidence in each place the assessment asks for it.

That final point comes directly from experience.

One NHS supplier I supported already had a Carbon Reduction Plan that should have supported Level 2, but still received No Level Awarded.

The problem was much simpler. The assessment asked for the link to the Carbon Reduction Plan in more than one place, and the supplier had completed one of those fields but not the other. Once we traced the result back through the assessment, it was clear that rewriting the Carbon Reduction Plan would have achieved nothing. The evidence already existed; the missing information was in the assessment itself.

If your Carbon Reduction Plan appears to meet the criteria, compare the actual Evergreen answers against it before changing the underlying document.

3. If everything looks right, question the result

There is one more possibility.

I have also worked with an NHS supplier whose evidence appeared to support Level 1 and whose Evergreen answers appeared to be correct, but the system still returned No Level Awarded.

We checked the evidence and the assessment and could not identify an obvious Level 1 gap. The issue ultimately had to be raised with the people responsible for the system because there appeared to be a software problem.

That does not mean you should assume there is a problem with the system. Check the evidence and your answers first. But if both stand up to scrutiny, it is reasonable to query a result that does not appear to follow from what you submitted.

Would you like some help working through it?

You do not need to diagnose every detail yourself before asking for support. For many businesses, Evergreen is one requirement among many, and there may be little value in spending hours troubleshooting a system you only use occasionally.

The important thing is to understand what actually needs attention before you start creating or replacing evidence that may already be perfectly usable.

Where should you go next?

• If you want a quick sense of where your existing evidence stands, use the free NHS Evergreen Readiness Check.
• If you want your documents checked against the level you are aiming for, the Evidence Review & Action Plan is the better route.
• If your evidence is substantially ready and you would prefer someone experienced to help you complete the assessment, Submission Support is designed for that.
• If you have already submitted and the result does not seem to match your evidence, the Evergreen Rescue Review is intended for exactly that situation.
• If you are not sure which route fits, the NHS Evergreen Assessment Support page brings the different options together.