Retreat over powers to lock up mental patients

Ministers were today accused of staging a U-turn over plans to lock up dangerous mental health patients.

The Government pulled back from closing a loophole which prevents people with severe personality disorders from being detained if their condition is untreatable.

A watered-down draft Mental Health Bill included a new "treatability" test under which some dangerous individuals would continue to slip through the net.

Ministers will, however, go ahead with controversial plans to force care-in-the-community patients to undergo treatment or be returned to hospital.

Labour claimed its reforms amounted to the biggest shakeup in mental health laws since the Fifties. But critics focused on the decision on dangerous and untreatable patients.

In 1998, the then home secretary Jack Straw promised action amid public anger over the case of Michael Stone, who had been diagnosed with an untreatable personality disorder and is now appealing against his conviction for the murders of Lyn and Megan Russell.

Draft laws published in 2002 would have closed the loophole. But ministers came under pressure from psychiatrists who were reluctant to take responsibility for ordering the detention of people they judged untreatable.

Under today's plans, people with severe personality disorders could only be treated if a psychiatrist could devise a plan of "clinically appropriate treatment" which would help their condition, although not necessarily-cure it. Louis Appleby, the Government's national director for mental health, said: "There are obviously other people who are dangerous but they are not the people for whom this Mental Health Act is designed.

"It will be for clinical and social care staff to decide whether it is clinically appropriate to treat someone under the Act."

When Mr Straw promised to take action his officials estimated that 2,500 individuals were judged dangerous and untreatable.

Despite today's U-turn, mental health charities maintained their opposition to the proposals.