The mother of murdered schoolgirl April Jones has joined Kate McCann to launch a new campaign aimed at signing up at least a million people to a missing children's alert scheme.
Coral Jones and Mrs McCann, mother of missing Madeleine, unveiled a digital billboard at King's Cross station in London promoting an enhanced Child Rescue Alerts system to inform the public about missing children whose lives are considered at risk.
The scheme will use social media including text messages, email and digital billboards across the UK in addition to traditional broadcast media to issue the alerts when it is launched on Sunday, International Missing Children's Day.
The scheme, the responsibility of the National Crime Agency (NCA) in partnership with the charity Missing People and the company Groupcall Limited, already has 25,000 people signed up. Organisers say the scheme will be able to issue localised and national alerts and has a target of a million to sign up by the end of its first year.
Chris Hedges, manager for Missing and Abducted Children at Ceop, part of the NCA, said: "It enables us to disseminate messages either at a very localised level or nationally quickly and effectively whenever there is a particularly highly endangered child we are trying to locate."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article