Sofa so good

Jason Wylie joined Newcastle council’s furniture service in 1994, straight from a spell as an infantry officer in Northern Ireland. “It was an enforcement role for the council – my army background got me into it. When we started, losses were running at 30%. We would go and carry out checks, make sure tenants weren’t selling on furniture and take them to court if they were. We used to go round second-hand shops to recover it. It was pretty confrontational.”

Ten years on, Wylie is the manager of a very different service, one that has grown enormously in size and sophistication. Tenants can rent everything they need to furnish their homes for a weekly charge on top of their rent, and Wylie’s 11 drivers and four 7.5-tonne lorries make 2200 deliveries a year from a 1000 m2 warehouse.

The service has grown from six to 26 staff, and has a turnover of £1.75m, which feeds a surplus into the housing revenue account of Your Homes, Newcastle’s arm’s-length management organisation. And last month, it became one of the first council furniture providers to win a government Charter Mark for excellence in customer service.

Losses have dropped to just 3% of turnover – the second-hand shops Wylie used to visit now know to phone when someone turns up hawking council property.

The furniture service was born in 1989 to help tenants aged 16 to 25 after the council’s research showed a lack of basic necessities was the reason young people’s tenancies failed. Five years later, it was extended to single parents and, in 1997, to all tenants.

Today, the average age of customers is 35. The team serves 4500 Newcastle council tenants and 360 homes used by the local authority’s asylum seeker unit – as well as 535 households nearby through deals with Chester-le-Street, Durham and Derwentside councils, Blythe Valley’s ALMO and Home Housing Association.

Tenants are introduced to the service through a glossy 20-page brochure with pictures of everything from white goods to cutlery. Wylie admits offering such a range of items still carries risks. “Washers, cookers and fridge freezers have a high value on the second-hand market. We’ve got six officers to manage that,” he says.

Points mean choices

The range of goods on offer has broadened considerably since September, when Wylie devised a novel points system to give customers more choice. “We’ve gone from having set packs, with only certain items available, to a system where they can have anything they want and we add up the points value of each item,” he explains.

So what impressed the Charter Mark judges? Wylie believes it was the customer care ethos that runs right through the organisation. “We don’t come to work and deliver furniture; we deliver a service and the furniture is part of that,” he says. “If our drivers go on a delivery and the customer needs something else moving, they’ll do that for them.”

We don’t give people furniture, we furnish a home 

Jason Wylie, Newcastle Council

Wylie’s team offers deliveries until 8pm on Tuesdays for tenants who work during the day, and its catalogue includes pledges to repair or replace faulty or worn-out electrical items within two days and other items within five. Wylie introduced customer satisfaction surveys in August, but says the sample size is still too small to show any clear trends.

He points not only to the financial success of the service, but also to the way it has helped people to sustain their tenancies.

In 1989, the average length of an unfurnished tenancy for the under-25s was six weeks. In September this year, the average tenancy (for all customers) lasted 163 weeks.

“It makes you appreciate what you’re doing. I go out one day a month and speak to customers. It’s a way of reality checking.”

Here, sustainability doesn’t only apply to keeping tenancies going: the service recycles 60 tonnes of packaging and waste a week. “We’re quite a green machine,” says Wylie. Some of the furniture is also reused. Beds are stripped down and the components remade by a local company that hires people on low incomes. This saves the service £43 per item.

In the service’s infancy, it bought second-hand pieces but it now spends more than £1m a year on new goods. Items are chosen by the 13 members of the steering group, who meet every three months. They have just finished poring over catalogues and samples to select six new suppliers. The stock isn’t chosen on price alone, but also on quality, durability and appearance. “We don’t just give people furniture; we furnish a home,” says Wylie.

The success has also meant it can fund 80% of a £50,000 child safety equipment scheme, which Charter Mark intends to promote as best practice. It began as a partnership between the local health authority and the council four years ago to cut the number of children hurt in household accidents. Every low-income family in the city is entitled to a free pack worth £39, including stair gates, fireguards, smoke alarms, doorstoppers and cupboard locks, installed when children are six months old. The service fits 1300 a year, and research in the east end of the city has shown an 80% fall in accidents. “It’s having a huge, huge impact,” says Wylie.

Being the manager of Newcastle’s largest – and arguably most customer-focused – furniture supplier also gives him a unique insight into the city’s interiors fads. “The most popular items are sofas,” he reveals. “Terracotta; everyone wants terracotta. We go through spells – there’ll be a week when it’s blue, but hardly anyone wants green. Terracotta is the outright winner.”