Secure unit for men not wanted on our doorstep

Published: 22 July, 2010

• AS a local resident I must thank your newspaper for advising us that the Camden & Islington NHS Foundation Trust is developing a very unwelcome 15-bedded male secure unit on our doorstep at its Highgate Mental Health Unit facility on Dartmouth Park Hill. 

This is already a large mental health unit with all the problems associated.

There has been no local consultation about this project or I am sure that it would have been strongly opposed. 

A search of the trust’s board papers produces little if any information about this development which has been carried out under a veil of secrecy.

Why do they want to open such a unit?

The foundation trust has a perfectly good site at St Luke’s, Woodside, which is currently unused and being prepared for sell-off which it could use to build a secure mental health facility should it need one.

There it could put in all the necessary walls and fencing which are not available on the Dartmouth Park Hill site.

Instead it chooses to set the facility in an already busy hospital near a main road. 

It is abundantly clear that all the necessary security cannot be put in place without turning the Highgate Mental Health Centre into a fortress.

As far as risk is concerned, one is forced to recall that it is this organisation in previous forms which was responsible for Christopher Clunis and Anthony Hardy and they were not in secure conditions.

Its ability to protect the public from those who are deemed to need secure conditions is very much in doubt.

ANNA BERMOND
Croftdown Road,
NW5