The aim of the ‘2Reuse’ project is to provide an efficient, cost effective service to housing tenants, predominantly in the Social Housing market. This service is deemed to have an imminent growth surge due the new legislation regarding the definition of ‘Homelessness’. The ‘2ReUse’ service will provide these tenants with a ‘Basic Home Start’ furniture pack (detailed below) and at the same time offer several other ancillary services. These would include ‘House Clearances’, largely on behalf of the Social Landlords, Sales to the general public and a PAT (Portable Appliance Testing) service to the Social Landlords with this service also being offered to the larger business community.

Extensive investigation of the similar established activities in Aberdeen, Banchory and Buckie together with wide-ranging discussions with the various social landlords has enabled us to form a robust model for our proposed scheme. This is a brief summarised conclusion of our work to date.

The three main social landlords in our proposed area (outside of the Local Authority Housing Service) are Langstone, Tenants First and Grampian. These three have a housing stock of some 700 units between them (from Fraserburgh to Ellon). It is important to stress that the potential market extends well beyond these three landlords. For instance the local authority has a housing base of some 2000 units and while at this stage no detailed discussions have taken place with this service we are aware that they are showing a great deal of interest in our proposals and are more than likely to become involved at some stage.

Furthermore, there are many groups in the field such as the Barnados Social Work, Working for Families and others all of whom have a need, at various levels, to provide their own clients with materials that we propose to deal with and have shown an interest in using our services.