BURY'S thriving Home Watch scheme has become a victim of its own success.

Now, the structure is to be reshaped to allow police to significantly improve its input into the community crime watchdog borough-wide.

With a staggering 560 Home Watches up and running throughout the Bury area, it has simply become impossible for police to provide a service to each and every scheme.

Now, there are plans to streamline the operation and to make it much easier for police to serve.

Insp Peter Fitzpatrick of the divisional community affairs department explained: "What we want to do is to include all the Home Watches in 14 groups which will reflect the borough's electoral wards.

"Each ward or group would elect its own chairman and secretary who we can deal with, rather than the position at present where we have 560 separate co-ordinators."

He added: "Any information we have would be relayed to these 14 representatives and then cascaded down via themselves to the co-ordinators they deal with."

Police are confident they will be able to offer substantial more support and greater service to Home Watch in general.

"Under the new arrangements, Home Watch will have a larger voice and a bigger body," stressed Insp Fitzpatrick.

From February 5 to April 8, police will be staging a series of 14 meetings throughout the borough to explain the new initiative and to help establish the groups. Insp Fitzpatrick continued: "We originally looked at this new idea last July and decided it was feasible. Details were then put into the Home Watch newsletters."

He hopes that Home Watch representatives throughout the borough will endorse the changes at the forthcoming meetings. "Hopefully at these gatherings we'll be able to spell out the benefits," Insp Fitzpatrick said. "We hope, ultimately, it will lead to a reduction in complaints from Home Watches who say there is a lack of service and contact from the police."

At present, the division is served by a "ring round" computer system whereby relevant Home Watch information is relayed from police headquarters to Home Watch representatives.

But because of the number of schemes operating in the borough, it's been impossible for police to serve them all.

"The new arrangements will give us just 14 targets to hit," explained Insp Fitzpatrick.

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