Bill to impose care on mental patients to be resurrected

An "unacceptable gap" in mental health legislation which leaves patients and the public at risk will be closed by a Bill which extends compulsion and will prevent the most seriously disordered from slipping through the net, the Government said yesterday.

The day after an inquiry into the killing of Denis Finegan - who was stabbed to death while cycling through Richmond Park in south-west London, by John Barrett, a mental patient - found serious failings in his care, the Health minister Rosie Winterton said there had to be a balance between the rights of patients and the need to protect the public. "We want to improve the safety of both patients and the public," she said. "This Bill will help ensure that people with serious mental health problems receive the treatment they need to protect them and others from harm."

But opposition to the Bill, first proposed eight years ago and much slimmed down after two draft versions were savaged by critics, is undiminished.

Doctors and mental health campaigners attacked the central proposals - new powers to compel patients discharged from hospital to continue taking their treatment and to lock up people with severe personality disorders - claiming they were discriminatory, authoritarian and unnecessary.

Opposition parties signalled their intention to give the Bill a rough ride through Parliament, where the Government plans to introduce it in the Lords.

Tim Loughton, a Tory health spokesman, said: "This Bill is the Government's latest attack on civil liberties. It threatens to extend coercive measures to a wider range of people with the likely consequence that some people with mental illness will be fearful of presenting themselves for treatment in the first place."