“I TELL MY STORY
BECAUSE I CAN GET AWAY WITH IT”
Stuart Fearn MBE
Across 15 years with Newcastle Building Society, Stuart Fearn helped them buck the banking sector trend and commit to the region's high streets. He earned an MBE for his work during the pandemic, and now helps like-minded organisations connect and find their purpose.
We speak to him about his career, living with chronic illness, and the future of North Shields.
Interview by Arlen Pettitt
Photographs by Christopher Owens
It's difficult to say for sure which act of his career Stuart Fearn is on.
But for the railway engineer, turned financial advisor, turned banking industry leader, turned charity sector director, the important thing is taking what he knows and using it to have an impact on people’s lives.
This current act is driven by purpose, something which Fearn has found by virtue of his understanding of the challenges some people in society face every single day.
This began when he first became a financial advisor and found himself in the homes of people who didn’t necessarily have much, but were trying to plan for the future. Fearn helped them save.
He later moved into larger investments and pensions, before joining Leeds Building Society and eventually heading up savings, mortgages and financial advice.
In 2008, Fearn moved to the North East to take up a role with Newcastle Building Society.
In 2012, things started to change for him.
“If people are working full time and they're still in poverty that needs to be dealt with. If we can't deal with that, we're definitely not going to deal with the poverty of those who don't work at all.”
“I was struck by an illness,” he explains, “ulcerative colitis. It took me out of the business for a year whilst I had surgeries and I lost my bowel. So I became somewhat disabled for a period of time.”
“When I came back into the business,” he continues, “I took over the branch network and it kind of put me back in the community, really in the heart of the community.”
Fearn took on that role at a time when many banks were closing their high street branches, and Newcastle Building Society made a decision to go in a different direction.
They found ways to not only stay on the high street, but also open new branches.
This included innovative partnerships with other organisations. The first such branch opened in Yarm in 2016, working with the local authority to put a branch in the local library. This helped create a new model of how banking services could be delivered on the high street.
We’re speaking in the Exchange building in North Shields, and Stuart references another Newcastle Building Society branch which recently opened just up the road from there in partnership with the YMCA North Tyneside.
The change of emphasis, and the importance of those partnerships, meant Fearn’s role evolved.
“Rather than being in an operational role of looking after branches of building societies,” he says, “it became more about providing financial services to communities, business people in those communities, and providing better support.”
“That support wasn't just financial services,” he continues, “it was providing community rooms within branches for communities to gather, providing resources to go outside of the branch network into communities, to give support and volunteering.”
It meant Stuart’s role became much more about forging relationships and getting to know the communities the building society served. That included thinking about broader support for the high streets and people who relied upon them, or else “they were going to disappear around us,” he says. “It suddenly became a completely different role for me.”
“I was struck by an illness - ulcerative colitis.
It took me out of the business for a year when I had surgeries and I lost my bowel.
So I became somewhat disabled for a period of time.”
When the pandemic happened and high street banks were closing branches across communities in the North East, Newcastle Building Society, and Stuart as head of their branch network, made sure their branches stayed open and took on locations left vacant by their competitors.
He recalls opening a branch in Bishop Auckland, taking on a site closed by Virgin Money after their takeover by CYBG.
“We moved in the day they left with no power,” Fearn says. “We were innovative and found a way of using mobile equipment to start the journey online and just started opening accounts as soon as they walked through the door. Hundreds of accounts so all those customers who had been left behind didn't get left behind. They just picked up with us and carried on and in the place they were comfortable with on the high street.”
Stuart sees this kind of approach as baked into the building society movement. As mutual organisations, they inherently have a connection and a responsibility to the communities they serve.
The pandemic and the years which followed saw a change in Stuart’s own outlook. Given his health issues, he was one of those who was supposed to be staying home, out of the firing line as the waves of coronavirus hit. If anything, he leaned into work, playing an active role in branches and getting involved in food banks, small businesses and an initiative to encourage people to spend locally in North Tyneside.
Such were his efforts that he received an MBE for services to the community of Newcastle and the North East during the pandemic, as part of the special Covid-19 honours list in the Autumn of 2020.
He talks about this time as giving him clarity. This is what connecting communities with a better financial future could look like. It was about building relationships and partnerships, and reaching people where they were with support which was relevant to them.
In 2023, after 15 years with Newcastle Building Society, Fearn made a change, taking up an opportunity to work with Society Matters CIC.
Society Matters Group is the umbrella organisation for Citizens Advice Gateshead, and delivers regional and national contracts social impact projects, as well as consultancy and training services to employers. It’s all targeted at supporting people of our region - working people in particular - to help deliver tangible change and create a fairer society.
Stuart went from dealing those who had money, and with people with some degree of financial capability and awareness, to dealing with poverty on a day-to-day basis.
His mission was to build connections in the same way he had at the building society and find organisations which shared common purpose.
A key piece of work was a project funded through the then North of Tyne Combined Authority targeting child poverty prevention by working with employers to help them understand their employees and their families situations better.
“It's an important way to approach poverty in the region,” Stuart says. “It’s not the most significant poverty, but if people are working full time and they're still in poverty that needs to be dealt with. If we can't deal with that, we're definitely not going to deal with the poverty of those who don't work at all.”
“You just don't know what's going on in life. It's one of the reasons why I talk about it - not because I want people to know I've got an illness - but for all those people that are in that situation where they can’t talk about it.”
Fearn is keenly aware of how family circumstances influence the choices you make. Growing up in a council house in York, he passed his eleven plus but didn’t go to grammar school or university. Instead, led by his familial expectations, he left education at 16 and got a job, following up with further education later in life.
That experience means he’s very aware of opportunity and making the most of it. He recalls working closely with Prince’s Trust apprentices at the building society and making sure they were right at the heart of things and given the chance to challenge themselves and discover what they were good at.
Fearn sees a direct connection between how employers behave and the economic success of the region, as well as the opportunities for people in the North East.
His own personal experience with disability has helped shape this view.
“I'm somebody who's got colitis,” he says, “I lost my bowel, I’m now diagnosed with Crohn's, and recently impacted by blood clots in my lungs due to medication. But the thing is, I can work, most can work, but the fact is we have to provide a reason for people to work, including support - a sympathetic employer, someone who makes it easier, somebody who adjusts to suit people. There's lots of different adjustments that make all that difference.”
Fearn’s experience has made him more empathetic, and given him a far greater understanding of what it’s like to juggle your health - or other challenges - with work.
He recalls going back to work after his first diagnosis and treatment for colitis, taking enough medication to be falling asleep through day.
That awareness that others might be struggling in a similar way is what drove him to act through the pandemic, and what still keeps him motivated now.
Stuart is an advocate for Crohn’s and colitis, and is vocal about his illness online, which he sees as particularly important given its largely hidden.
“You just don't know what's going on in life,” Fearn says. “It's one of the reasons why I talk about it - not because I want people to know I've got an illness - but for all those people that are in that situation where they can’t talk about it.”
“I tell my story because I can get away with it. I can talk about the support required and provided” he continues. “You get all those people who actually can't because they're scared of what it might mean to them because they work for the wrong employer or they do the wrong job.”
“We can work, but the fact is we have to provide a reason for people to work - a sympathetic employer, someone who makes it easier, somebody who adjusts to suit people. There's lots of different adjustments that make all that difference.”
Stuart’s passion for the North East and its people is obvious, and he’s become involved in a range of projects, including the 800th anniversary of North Shields. The celebration will include a set of murals on prominent buildings in the town, including one already in place on Albion Road from North East artist Prefab_77.
Fearn talks about how North Shields - his home since he moved to the North East in 2008 - is undergoing a period of renewal.
As well as the Exchange, he mentions Harbour House as another example of how people are investing in the town, and doing things differently - often self-financing or taking their first steps into property and business development.
The connecting principle is purpose, being driven by it, and a desire to create spaces or projects which bring people together and make a tangible difference to the communities around them.
Fearn is optimistic about what the future might hold for the North East, and about the power of devolution to help shape that future by tackling some of the big challenges which remain. He sees an appetite from businesses and other organisations to be involved, “people are dying to be part of that influence of change.”
The lesson is that no one can do it alone - whether politicians, or employers or community groups - but instead the real change happens when everyone pulls together.