Tories, Liberal Democrats and Labour MPs pledged to oppose it and the final straw came when the House of Commons and House of Lords Joint Committee on Human Rights concluded that the Bill’s definition of mental disorder was so wide it could allow health professionals to act as “guardians of morality”.Mr Milburn did not want the row over mental health to cast a shadow over the measures he saw as serving his priority: to save the NHS. “He had left the work and pretty much the thinking about that [the mental health Bill] to Jacqui Smith [the health minister],” a Westminster source said.Mr Blunkett was furious at the lack of support and remains so, according to some sources – despite Mr Milburn’s robust pledge to the Commons on Thursday night that “reform has to happen in mental health services just as it has to happen across the whole of the National Health Service”.However, one notable omission from that speech was any mention of the plan to detain people with severe personality disorder who have committed no crime – the most controversial element of the Bill and one viewed by his advisers as unworkable in its present form. The plan formed the cornerstone of the White Paper published in December 2000 and, despite widespread criticism from professional and patient groups, appeared almost unchanged in the draft Bill published last June.The flaw in the proposal was that it failed to distinguish the mad from the bad. The key case, which alarmed ministers and the public, was the 1996 murder of Lin Russell and her six-year-old daughter Megan, who were killed in front of nine-year-old Josie Russell by Michael Stone as they were walking on a country lane in Kent.Stone was a man with a violent past.

This, ministers said, exposed a dangerous loophole in the law. In the draft mental health Bill they laid out their plans to detain people “who pose a serious risk of harm to others as a result of mental disorder”. But if Michael Stone’s condition was untreatable, as the psychiatrists argued, then he should properly be labelled “bad” rather than mad and dealt with by the criminal justice system.As Professor John Cox, former president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, put it: “It is not our job to cure society’s ills. Our job is to treat people and get them better.”This remains the sticking point for the Department of Health. Over the past six months since the Bill was published the argument between it and the Home Office has centred on the definition of “mental disorder”, what is to count as “treatment”, and how many people with severe personality disorder might have to be detained.Early Home Office estimates put the number that could have been pulled in at more than 14,000, which would have overwhelmed the psychiatric service and raised serious civil liberty issues.Officials from the Department of Health argued that the criteria must be drawn tightly so that only the most dangerous individuals, numbering a few hundred not already in prison or mental hospital, would be included.

That was the only chance of winning opponents over to support the Bill, they said. They also argued that only those who had committed a criminal offence should be detained – removing the civil route into custody. If that was achieved, Department of Health officials believed opposition to the Bill would wilt.Mr Milburn is keeping his powder dry for the battles to come. Reform of the law is urgently needed to reflect the enormous changes in the way mentally ill people are cared for today – mostly in their own homes in the community rather than in the huge Victorian asylums of the past. In 1959, when the present law was enacted (it was updated in 1983) 155,000 people were contained in Britain’s mental hospitals compared with 30,000 today.But if the Bill is to win the support that it needs the conceptual flaw at its heart must be resolved. Ministers are proposing to lock up people with personality disorder to protect the public. Dangerousness should therefore be the criterion for detention, not mental illness.