Tameside home watch scheme wins award

Date published: 24 February 2010

Members of Ashton St Peter’s Neighbourhood Policing Team are celebrating after receiving a grant from the Neighbourhood and Home Watch Network, in recognition of its work promoting Home Watch.

The £1,000 grant made by the national body for Home Watch schemes in England and Wales will now help support a crime prevention project in St Peter’s ward in Ashton-under-Lyne. The NPT’s work was selected as an example of best practice for its promotion of Home Watch to residents and the wider community such as businesses, housing associations, charities, not-for-profit organisations and religious groups.

Although St Peter’s has an established Home Watch scheme the neighbourhood officers and volunteer Home Watch coordinators recognised that it had become dominated by a small group of residents and was loosing momentum.

In response the NPT and volunteers decided to widen their approach so that the scheme not just focused on the home, but also the wider community.

To do this the scheme was widened and invited a number of groups to join Home Watch and used that network to build a sense of local identity.

This group, along with the established PACT (Partners And Communities Together) network, also provided valuable information to the police as well as an outlet for communicating to the wider community about the work being done on its behalf.

Key to the group’s success has been the increasing support and amount of local information provided to the police by widening the Home Watch scheme’s appeal such as linking in with the local Pub Watch scheme. By being able to use this information and coordinate efforts between all the interested groups this has directly and indirectly helped to reduce crime and perceptions of crime in the area.

Included in this has been the scheme’s work with the local mosque that operates a public address system in 250 homes. The system is primarily used for religious purposes, but is now used by neighbourhood officers to send out key crime reduction advice and information. By working with the mosque these messages are also being translated into Urdu.

Neighbourhood officer PC Mark Akers said: “By moving away from the traditional definition of who can become a Home Watch member we have broadened the scheme’s appeal. This has helped the group thrive and increased the opportunities to gather information as well as communicate more effectively with the community and coordinate our efforts with other interested parties such as local businesses.

“Our work with religious groups and charitable organisations has also helped Home Watch to talk to members of the community that have been traditionally hard to reach.”

The Neighbourhood and Home Watch Network is now showcasing the St Peter’s ward scheme on its website and through a series of regional conferences as an example of best practice.