Leave the policies to me, Blunkett tells officials
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Your support makes all the difference.David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, made an outspoken attack on health professionals and civil servants yesterday, accusing them of trying to wreck his plans to lock up dangerous mentally disordered people.
Mr Blunkett responded furiously to a report in yesterday's Independent that officials at the Department of Health had "reservations" on his intention to force people with untreatable illnesses into mental hospitals.
Speaking in London to the mental health charity the Zito Trust, he said: "There has been a tradition of people thinking they can have a separate policy to the ministers they are serving – and they can't."
In criticisms apparently aimed at the Mental Health Alliance, an umbrella group of opponents to the Mental Health Bill that includes the British Medical Association and the Royal College of Psychiatrists, Mr Blunkett said he would not back down on his plans.
The Home Secretary accused opponents of the Bill – which will be announced in the Queen's Speech next month – of having misrepresented the facts. He said: "I make an appeal to those who are debating this difficult issue to tell the truth, not to try to put words in other people's mouths or to presume that we are taking away people's rights or doing anything to undermine the individual's freedom."
He said that by keeping people in secure conditions he was not "warehousing" them but was providing them with treatment. The Home Secretary's comments give an indication of how worried min- isters are about the way the plans will be received in Parliament. Many mental health organisations are worried by proposals that will allow doctors to force mentally ill people to take medication.
But the Government wants to protect the public from dangerous people such as Michael Stone, the killer of Lin Russell and her daughter Megan in 1996, who previously avoided being held in a secure institution because his condition was regarded as untreatable.
Mr Blunkett said he intended to remove the "treatability test", which he said had sometimes been used by dangerous people to secure discharge from hospital.
* A committee of MPs is accusing "over-enthusiastic" police officers of ruining people's lives by pursuing false claims of child abuse.
The Home Affairs Select Committee calls for limits on "trawling" for evidence in such cases, in a report published today. It says inquiries into claims dating back 30 years had created "a new genre of miscarriages of justice".
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