West Mercia NW – NW Scheme Approval Process

From the very inception, NW National have encouraged all schemes to get any neighbours that live within a coordinators declared area to join as a National Member and then request that they should also then join their Local Scheme so that the real amount of members can be seen on the system by NWN. This can be done by them joining at the www.ourwatch.org.uk website.

This is for two reasons. Firstly, the limited funding that the NWN charity receive is partly based on how many people across the country have joined as a member and secondly, it helps the Force Area Association (FAA) also understand how many people are actually members.  We are asked quite often by West Mercia Police as to how many members there are within their West Mercia Police Force Area or in particular Policing Areas, and we can only go with the numbers that are shown on the system.

You may well have a number of your neighbours that you and they consider to be ‘members’ of your scheme, but if they are not registered on the National System, they are invisible to us and NWN and in the cold light of day, that doesn’t help you, them, the FAA or NWN. If your neighbours won’t join NWN online, then they are not members of NW.  They would not be covered by the NW Third Party Insurance if anyone claimed against them while they thought they were doing any of the scheme’s business and both we and National can’t count them as members because to them and us as the FAA, they are invisible. Each member gets a unique Membership Number when they join.

Unless there is a decent showing of members, we, the FAA can’t help you with the supply of free street signs and stickers as well, because we cannot see how that would benefit anyone when just the Coordinator is listed as the only member or just one or two other members. The signs are expensive and being part of NW means all the neighbours pulling together and supporting each other in a visible way, and supporting the Police in helping to deter criminal behaviour in your area. If you haven’t done a Letterbox drop to all your neighbours in your scheme area, you can contact us for a ready made template that you can ‘tune’ to your scheme name and with your details, then print out and drop a leaflet to all your neighbours.

If any of your neighbours are not on the internet, we can help you by signing them up manually. All we need is their First Name, Surname, Address with Postcode and either a Landline Phone Number or a Mobile Phone Number.

As stated above, we would encourage you to ask all of your ‘local’ neighbours to join NW via the OurWatch website and then once they have verified their email address with the system, they can go into the ADMIN area of their account, search for your registered scheme and request to join it officially.

Once the system shows that there are numerous different household members (greater than 5), in your scheme, in addition to yourself, we will happily mark you as an approved scheme.