NOW that the government has, quite rightly, reversed the policy of releasing mentally ill patients into the community when they should be in hospitals, it follows that extra accommodation will be needed because so many of the old institutions have been shut.

Yet what is the sense of the NHS selling off land at these places when they are closed or in the process of running down when it may be needed for the new, smaller centres Health Secretary Frank Dobson has in mind.

Care in the community was, as this newspaper has pointed out for years, a well-intentioned, but flawed policy - as a grim catalogue murders of innocent people and patients suicides showed - that underlined the folly of shutting too many mental hospitals.

But if it has taken decades for the government to reach the same conclusion as us, it ought to take no time at all for it to realise that hospital land sales are patent obstacles to the process of undoing the mistake.

Ribble Valley MP Nigel Evans is right to call for a freeze on such disposals.

For while it may be that many sites can be safely sold off without detriment to the new policy, such sales should be put on hold until a thorough assessment has taken place of what land is needed and what is not.

It would be wasteful, and delaying, if the NHS has to go around buying expensive new sites for the new-style mental hospitals when it owns plenty of prime locations already.

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