Cranleigh Repair Café will be joining repair groups from across the UK at a repair café in Parliament, to call for policies to make it easier to repair things.

The event, scheduled for Wednesday, March 25, is organised by The Restart Project and Back Market, and supported by other organisations including SUEZ and Green Alliance.

The Restart Project and Back Market have run similar events for the last two years, attended by 60 MPs.

This year, the event will be even bigger, with around 100 repair groups expected to be represented from all four UK nations.

Cranleigh Repair Café will be joining repair groups from across the UK at a repair café in Parliament, to call for policies to make it easier to repair things. Picture contributed

placeholder image — Cranleigh Repair Café will be joining repair groups from across the UK at a repair café in Parliament, to call for policies to make it easier to repair things. Picture contributed

They will be calling for ambitious repair and reuse policies and celebrating the MPs – currently 109 – that have signed up to the Repair and Reuse Declaration.

With the Circular Economy Growth Plan due to publish their recommendations this spring, the repair community is taking a timely chance to influence their local politicians.

Cranleigh Repair Café hopes to meet local MPs, Jeremy Hunt and Chris Coghlan at the event in Parliament, and will encourage them to sign the UK Repair and Reuse Declaration, at which they will celebrate being one of over 100 MPs to support the Declaration.

They will discuss measures that they hope to see taken forward from the Circular Economy Growth Plan.

Following this event at the Palace of Westminster, Cranleigh Repair Café will be holding their regular monthly repair event for the local community at The Bandroom, Village Way, Cranleigh GU6 8AF.

At the event, local residents are encouraged to bring along furniture, electricals, electronics, bikes, mechanical, clocks, textiles, ceramics, wood, clothing and leather items where volunteers will do their very best to repair them.

The Cranleigh Repair Café has been helping local residents since July 2024 and is held on the first Saturday of each month.

They have around 35 active volunteers, 20 of which are repairers and the remainder look after refreshments, meet and greet and recycling.

The items they see most regularly are vacuum cleaners, clocks and lamps; the most often seen make is Dyson followed by Sony and Bosch.

Cranleigh Repair Café enter all theur data on the Repair Monitor.

Not all Repair Cafés use Repair Monitor to record their data but there are 180 UK Repair Cafés which are registered to use it and 447 worldwide.

Repair Monitor was developed by Repair Café which is the organisation which they are affiliated with.

It is used to track and share data about consumer item repairs worldwide.

It allows volunteers to record products, brands, failures, and solutions, aiming to create more durable, repairable products and boost the circular economy.

Cranleigh comes ninth in the Repair Monitor league for the number of repairs since they started. Since they started, they have looked at over 1,250 items with a 74.4 per cent success rate.

In 2025 Cranleigh were top of the Repair Monitor league for the UK – and fourth in the world – with 907 items brought in for repair and a 77.2% success rate.

Caroline Hayes, founder and chair of Cranleigh Repair Café, said: “We’re helping the Cranleigh community to get support with repair when they need it.

“We have found that local people want to repair rather than replace but they often don’t have the skills to do this themselves.

“We have seen first hand how important this service is both for household items such as vacuum cleaners and for sentimental items.

“The community of Cranleigh loves the Repair Café and we are often complimented on our welcoming and sociable atmosphere and kind volunteers.

“We have a very high success rate for repairs but where we can’t repair it is usually because spare parts are not available, or an item has been manufactured in such a way that it is impossible to open the product.

“We would like to see more support for repair as well as legislation to improve the manufacturing process so products are made with the intention of being repairable.”

Fiona Dear, co-director, The Restart Project, said: “We’re excited to go to Parliament with representatives of almost 100 of the UK’s repair cafés.

“Repair is something we can all do to save money and reduce waste, but it’s often too hard to fix our stuff.

“We want to show that repair is popular, and that government support to help us to give things a second life will also be popular. “

Katy Medlock, Back Market, said: “We’re thrilled to be returning for our third consecutive year alongside our partner, The Restart Project, championing repair and reuse.

“At Back Market, we’re on a mission to shift behaviour around new tech, encouraging more people to make the most from what they already own.

“Extending a device’s lifespan from two-and-a-half to 10 years can reduce carbon emissions by up to 68 per cent, which is why we’re calling for greater support of the Repair and Reuse Declaration to help accelerate progress toward a stronger, more sustainable future for repair.”