A £7MILLION mental health unit is to be replaced after being branded unsuitable just five years after it opened.

The Pendle View building at Blackburn's Queen's Park Hospital was opened in 2001 but is facing the axe, managers said today.

Critics reacted with shock to the news and said managers should have built the right type of accommodation in the first place.

And warnings were sounded that a further move to slash up to 50per cent of all East Lancashire's mental health beds must not damage patient care.

The rest of East Lancashire's mental health units for overnight patients are to also close and will be replaced by one unit for the whole area, by 2011. A public consultation on the plans was launched on Friday.

Although Pendle View, run by Lancashire Care Trust, is "relatively new" another building is needed, an official consultation document on the changes states.

The unit, which was completely new when it opened in 2001, "does not provide enough recreational and leisure space" or "appropriate space for visitors and families".

When it was opened by the now-defunct Blackburn, Hyndburn and Ribble Valley NHS Health Care Trust, NHS boss Rob Bellingham said it represented "a tremendous improvement on the previous facilities, offering an extremely high standard of accommodation to its users".

Today Tony Humphrys, chairman of Blackburn with Darwen Council's health scrutiny committee, said: "If they are building a new unit and taking into consideration the patients' needs then why don't they build it right in the first place?

"I would support having facilities on one site but it is strange it has been open such a short length of time and they are talking about closing it, even if the replacement is bigger and better."

Services at Pendle View are paid for by Blackburn with Darwen NHS Primary Care Trust. Mel Diack, chairman of the Patient and Public Involvement Forum watchdog which oversees the PCT, said: "Why has all this money been spent in the first place and then they are going to move it to a new unit? Why don't they think through these things in the long term?

"It is a poor reflection on the people who put that first plan together."

Yet Richard Jones, chairman of the Lancashire Mental Health and Social Care Partnership Board, which has put together the consultation, said mental health services had come on in leaps and bounds since then, meaning even new buildings like Pendle View were no longer suitable.

He said: "We are developing services but they are constrained, to a large extent, by the buildings out of which they operate."

This was particularly evident at other bed sites in Burnley, Rossendale and Accrington, which will now close, he said.

The buildings would be "considered for other healthcare use or closed once the proposed hospitals have been built" he said.

And a pending £9.5million investment in community-based services in East Lancashire will enable more patients to live at home rather than spend time in hospital. This will mean between 30 and 50per cent of the area's estimated 250 mental health beds being axed, he said.

The news come just over a week after it was revealed that a third of East Lancashire's main hospital beds will go by 2009.