Our board of trustees have provided external support to our teams over the years. They possess a varied and best in class range of expertise, which enhances the success of the FRC Group of businesses.

Our board of trustees are each appointed for their varied range of specialisms and expertise, as well as their desire to help add value in our mission to End Furniture Poverty.


Each and every one of them are highly accomplished and extremely valued by the FRC Group team. They meet at least four times per year to provide support to the FRC Group.


We’ve provided individual profiles for each member of the board of trustees below. We are proud to have such high calibre trustees to aid our journey to End Furniture Poverty through sustainable social business practices.


Find out more about the extended FRC Group Team, what it’s like to work at FRC here and our Current Vacancies.

Our Board

Nick Spruyt - Chair of Board of Trustees

Nick was Senior Executive Projects at Princes Ltd – the Liverpool based international food and drink group where his career has spanned 34 years. He was an executive Director of Princes for 15 years and has wide experience with an international track record of driving growth, integrating acquisitions, creating customer and supplier relationships, leading large and diverse teams and planning and implementing major investments.

As his long career with Princes reaches an end, he is in a position to share that business experience and leadership with the FRC trustees and team to help accelerate our mission to end furniture poverty. After years of working in the corporate world he is looking forward to the opportunity to contribute to a charity based in the same city.

Erik Bichard

Erik has served on the FRC Group board since 2002. His entire career has been devoted to the field of sustainable change. His first job was as an Environmental Planner at an English County Council before moving to sustainability consultancies which included some time working in Hong Kong. He was then asked by the Co-operative Bank to head up its National Centre for Business & Sustainability. Later he ran its partnership organisation Sustainability Northwest. Erik subsequently became a Professor of Regeneration and Sustainable Development at the University of Salford. There he turned his focus to developing a way to apply social return in investment in the built environment sector. This led to him co-founding the pioneering consultancy RealWorth which identifies, maximises, measures, and communicates the social value of buildings, places and programmes.

Throughout his career Erik has been a regular contributor to printed media, radio and television. He has published academic papers, book chapters and two books including ‘Positively Responsible’ and ‘The Coming of Age of the Green Community’. Erik has been a sustainability advisor to Co-operatives UK and Liverpool City Council. He is currently a member of the Royal Town Planning Institute, a Fellow of the RSA, a member of the Council of both the Merseyside Civic Society and Social Value UK.

Dr John Hines

Dr John Hines has served on the board since 2008. Having gained his D.Phil in Chemistry at Oxford University, John joined Unilever R&D in the UK. He has worked across all Home and Personal Care categories and on innovations for global brands including Dove, Skip and Axe.

Following a brief spell heading up a leading materials technology consulting business, he joined SC Johnson Professional as Global R&D Director in 2010. Since then he has led delivery to market of award winning innovations in Healthcare and Industrial & Institutional skincare.

Jeff Vernon

Jeff has served on the board of FRC Group since 2005.

He is the Finance & Banking Director of Rathbone Investment Management (RIM). RIM is a leading provider of discretionary investment and wealth management services for private clients and trustees. He also has operational responsibility for Group Treasury, Banking and regulatory reporting.

He qualified as an accountant while with Royal Insurance (now Royal SunAlliance) where he also gained an MBA . Having spent over 7 years with RSA in a variety of finance based roles, he joined Rathbones in 1999 and was appointed to the RIM Board in November 2000.