Tories take blame for reform 'horror'

The Tories will admit today that their flagship policy of releasing mentally ill patients into community care exposed the public to some of the "most horrifying" crimes of the past few decades.

Dr Liam Fox, the party's health spokesman, will acknowledge that the 1990 NHS and Community Care Act, which closed down the old asylums, was implemented too hastily and went too far.

"There has been, at times, too little care, scant support, and a form of community which has exposed the vulnerable, both patients and the public, to danger," he admits.

While it was right to phase out asylums, care in the community became discredited in the public mind because of a string of tragedies where mentally ill people had "fallen between the gaps", he says.

"The litany of cases represent some of the most horrifying and frightening crimes of the past few decades – Christopher Clunis stabbing Jonathan Zito on the platform of Finsbury Park, Horritt Campbell attacking nursery nurse Lisa Potts, Michael Stone murdering Lin and Megan Russell on a Kentish country lane, the attack on the late George Harrison in his own home, the Liberal Democrat councillor Andrew Pennington attacked by a man with a sword at a Cheltenham advice surgery," Dr Fox will tell a Conservative forum.