• CONCERNING your report (Fears for mentally ill as day unit closes in budget squeeze, March 11): the Rivers Crisis House is two minutes’ walk away from the Jules Thorn Centre on the St Pancras site, and not in Islington, and “yes” it is due to be closed.

But the Rivers will be replaced with provision in Gray’s Inn Road that will also incorporate the Daleham Gardens Crisis House, which you correctly refer to as being scheduled for closure and “repurposing”.

There will not be any loss of crisis beds, but no increase either, and both have been running at full capacity for some time.

Whether this will be an improvement only time will tell. A lot of thought and effort is being put in to make it so.

Certainly there will be some reductions in staffing but while in a six-bed crisis house three staff members are needed, doubling the number of residents does not automatically mean you need a proportional increase in staff.

However your point about the loss to the mental health community that will accrue from the closure of Jules Thorn is certainly well made and 100 per cent justified.

There is a certain irony in that 1676 the oldest mental hospital in the country, Bedlam, was moved and rebuilt on a much larger scale on a site in Moorfields; whereas the replacement for the wards on the current St Pancras site, to be built on land purchased from the Whittington, will be one which shows no increase in the number of beds.

It would seem that three-and-a-half centuries later our approach to making provision for people with mental health problems requiring hospitalisation is not just standing still but effectively going into reverse.

The thrust of your report is 100 per cent justified in the criticisms it makes of how much needed provision is being removed as a result of the St Pancras “land-grab” by Moorfields and UCL.

Once again mental health provision is being put to the end of the queue when it comes to the allocation of resources.

PETER LYONS, NW1