The FRN has set up a one-stop-shop for the accreditation and authorisation of its’ members’ services, in order to support members taking on contracts with furniture and electrical appliance manufacturers and retailers, plus services to businesses discarding large quantities of product, under a nationwide service delivery programme. This will enable FRN members to increase their product supply and improve the quality and quantity of product distributed to low income families.

In addition to assured services, it is imperative that the sector and the FRN members have a national profile and that the FRN can help negotiate partnerships with the private sector on behalf of its membership. Confident in the fact that members are competent to carry out quality assured services, the FRN will negotiate, establish and co-ordinate service agreements and partnerships with the private sector. These partnerships will result in service contracts/agreements for our members to collect end-of-life or returned household products from local manufacturer, retailer and business premises.

With an expected increase in business opportunities for FRN members, a trading arm, FRN Enterprises, was created at the end of last year - a company limited by share, where the only shareholder is the FRN - to ensure that the work members are interested in contracting should be separated from the work of the FRN charity. FRN Enterprises is the social enterprise, FRN is the charity. It allows FRN the charity to focus on its social objectives and FRN Enterprises to deal with our waste objectives, enabling a clearer division of responsibilities between different parts of the organisation.

The brokerage and accreditation activities of FRN will not only increase the supply of quality products for re-use throughout the sector but will also enable members to become financially sustainable through trading activities.

FRN Enterprises will only be dealing with those that are entrepreneurial. The vast majority of FRN members are socially focused and they will take WEEE and other products supplied under contract from organisations within FRN Enterprises. At the moment there are 27 hubs. But the product received by these will be more than they need, so they will pass the rest or sell the rest to the other organisations in their area.

In light of this, FRN Enterprises is developing its own accreditation system to give assurances to Producer Compliance Schemes and others on the quality and competencies of its members' collection and reuse services. FRN Enterprises cannot recommend organisations to take on contracts if it does not know that they are good enough or that they comply with all the relevant legislation, licensing requirements and that they work to quality assured services.

For the first time, the FRN's success depends upon the success of its members. In the past, the FRN's success was measured in writing good funding bids, whereas now we have an intimate link in terms of our success and our members' success.

How Accreditation will work
The purpose of regulation is therefore to protect our members and the supply of items, not to create a self serving bureaucracy.  If we fail to deliver on one contract in one part of the country, the ability to sustain the contract elsewhere and to gain contracts with other partners will be compromised.

An Accredited Re-user will be able to carry out separation of only reusable products from a contractor’s facility. The audit level for a stand alone re-use group will be dependant upon the type of product to be collected e.g. furniture or electrical equipment.

An Accredited Collector would be able to take on the collection of products for re-use, plus would be accredited to carry out waste collection and clearance contracts of all product waste from the contractors facilities.

The level of work required to audit a re-use operation is less onerous and less detailed than the higher level auditing required of an operation taking on commercial collection contracts in addition to the re-use activities.