Law to guard public from mentally ill is attacked

MPs and peers today condemned government proposals to protect the public from dangerous mental patients.

In a scathing report, a cross-party committee urged ministers to abandon measures which they claim would breach the civil rights of the mentally ill.

The committee said that the Government's draft Mental Health Bill "places too great an emphasis on protecting the public from a small minority of dangerous mentally-ill people".

It said the main aim of new laws should be to improve services, strengthen safeguards for patients and "reduce the stigma of mental disorder" - not to protect the public. But the criticism triggered an angry backlash from campaigners for the families of victims murdered by mental patients.

The Zito Trust, launched by the widow of musician Jonathan Zito, who was stabbed to death by a schizophrenic, said it was "absurd" to claim that the proposals infringed patients' rights.

The row broke out the day after a judge sentenced paranoid schizophrenic John Barrett to life for the random killing of banker Denis Finnegan in Richmond Park. It came a week after cannibal killer Peter Bryan was sentenced to life for two murders. He ate the brain of one victim.

Both killers walked out of London mental hospitals days before staging the unprovoked attacks. In the past two years, 10 people have been killed by mental patients in London.

The committee's chairman, Lib-Dem peer Lord Carlile of Berriew, accused ministers of reacting to a "public misconception about violence and mental illness". He said: "The Bill is fundamentally flawed. The committee believes that ministers should consider redrafting significant sections."

The dispute centres on two key proposals at the heart of the draft Bill, published last September.

The Government wants compulsory treatment for care-in-the-community patients, to end the "revolving door" where patients recover in hospital until they are released, then fail to take medication and deteriorate until they need to be readmitted. Under the draft laws, patients living in the community could be required to turn up at clinics at certain times for treatment. Those who failed to show up could be returned to a secure unit. Ministers also want to tighten a loophole which means individuals with severe personality disorders, who have committed no crime but are seen as dangerous, cannot be detained if their condition is deemed "untreatable" by psychiatrists. There are an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 such individuals with these disorders. Many are serving sentences in prisons or secure mental hospitals but some are on the streets with no restrictions on their movements.

The draft Bill would shrink the loophole, although not close it outright, by allowing individuals to be detained so long as there is a "clinically appropriate treatment" available - which would not necessarily have to amount to a cure.

However, the Zito Trust said the Barrett and Bryan cases highlighted the need for the Government to act.

Director Michael Howlett said: "Over the last 10 or 15 years, we have seen graphic evidence of the failure of services to engage those people who are currently either not eligible for treatment under mental health legislation, or are very difficult to engage - who are failed by the system."

Ministers pledged to act after the 1996 murders of Lin and Megan Russell by Michael Stone, who had been diagnosed with a personality disorder.