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How Northumbrian Water Keeps 3,000+ Colleagues Working, Whatever Happens to Their Device

Northumbrian Water and BornGood partnership graphic, the two company logos side by side, joined by a cross, over a flowing water image on a split light blue and brand blue background.
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 What matters most to us is the colleague experience. Whether someone is joining the business, reporting a fault, or simply needs a new accessory, our partnership with BornGood enables them to access the support and equipment they need quickly through the channel that works best for them. By offering a range of fulfilment options, from smart lockers to direct home delivery via DPD, BornGood has helped us streamline onboarding and offboarding, reduce downtime, and get colleagues back up and running faster.Most importantly, it gives us the flexibility to tailor the service to individual needs, providing more choice for our colleagues while improving operational efficiency and delivering a better overall user experience. 

Peter Cole | Head of UX | Northumbrian Water

When a new starter joins, a leaver hands back their laptop, or a device fails mid-week, the IT team absorbs the disruption. Multiply that across an organisation the size of Northumbrian Water, over 3,000 colleagues, and device logistics quietly consumes real IT time and budget that could be spent on the work that actually moves the service forward.

Always On IT is BornGood’s fully managed IT asset lifecycle service, built to take that entire burden away. One partner handles everything: new starter provisioning with next-day delivery, leaver collections with certified Blancco data erasure, rapid swap-outs for faulty or lost devices, and compliant end-of-life recycling. Every request is tracked through a single portal with published SLAs, so the team always knows exactly where every device is and what it’s worth.

Onboardingoffboarding graphic

Always On IT+
add the hardware, keep the flexibility

For organisations that want to move device costs from capital to a predictable monthly operating cost, Always On IT+ adds leased hardware to the managed service. Colleagues receive professionally refurbished Grade A laptops, indistinguishable from new in daily use, at roughly half the price and a fraction of the carbon footprint of buying new, with repair, replacement and refresh built in. No large upfront purchases, no disposal headaches, no assets sitting idle on a balance sheet.


Northumbrian Water procures Grade A refurbished hardware through Always On IT+ specifically to support its own sustainability targets, turning a routine hardware refresh into measurable progress against its environmental commitments.

In practice: Northumbrian Water

Northumbrian Water, which employs over 3,000 people, runs Always On IT across its entire device estate. Requests raised in their own service desk flow straight through to BornGood, and colleagues collect new starter devices, replacements and accessories from self-service smart lockers at key sites, available whenever they’re on site, with faulty devices swapped in a single visit. For everyone else, DPD delivers to the doorstep, with business-critical replacements arriving before 10:30 the next morning. The result: device requests that once bounced between teams now resolve without IT lifting a finger.

Built for public sector priorities

  • Sustainability targets, met by default. Defra’s Digital Sustainability Strategy 2025 to 2030 sets a target of 80% of end-user devices refurbished or remanufactured by 2030. Defra itself has already gone further: its live five-year contract with Atos puts 90% of its 72,000 devices across 30,000 staff onto refurbished or remanufactured hardware, delivering a 44% cut in carbon emissions and a 40% cost saving against buying new. Always On IT+ gets organisations there now, with CO2e-avoided reporting for every device (refurbished laptops save an estimated 316kg of CO2 each compared with buying new, per Cranfield University research) to evidence progress.

  • Security and compliance, evidenced. Blancco-certified data erasure with tamper-proof audit trails, full chain of custody, ISO 9001, 14001, 27001 and 45001, Cyber Essentials Plus, and WEEE-compliant disposal.

  • Social value, built in. Through our Community Interest Company, BornGood has distributed 200+ laptops, donated over £50,000 in equipment, saved 63,200kg of CO2, and supported 10+ organisations. That work started with our first project, Gentoo, and continues this September with a new project donating 48 computers via a child poverty fund. Recovered devices can be donated to local charities and digital inclusion programmes where a suitable project exists, a ready-made social value contribution for annual reporting.

  • Value recovered, not written off. We achieve a 98% asset recovery rate, returning residual value to the budget instead of the skip.

Always On IT scales from a handful of devices to full-estate management, and onboarding is measured in weeks, not months. There’s no software to install and no project team required on your side.

Ready to make device problems someone else’s problem?

Book a demo and we’ll walk through what Always On IT would look like for your own estate.