DERBY'S controversial new mental health hospital is to take prisoners from jails and courts, the Telegraph can reveal today.

And Derby City Council has admitted it did not even know about the criminals when it initially gave the go-ahead for the City Gate complex without proper public consultation.

Residents and Alvaston ward councillors were outraged when the Telegraph first revealed details about the complex, which was being built without their knowledge.

Now they are flabbergasted to find the unit, off London Road, will house criminals.

The Telegraph uncovered in March that city planners had approved the building work without properly advertising the plans. The council then agreed to carry out extensive consultation and finally take it before a public planning meeting.

But it concluded that the hospital would still go ahead.

Officers originally agreed to approve the hospital under delegated powers. At that stage there was no public meeting to discuss the proposal.

Developer Cygnet did not legally have to tell the council who was going to be treated.

But Paul Bayliss, also an Alvaston ward councillor, was shocked the public had not been told it would house prisoners.

He said: "I'm extremely annoyed. This is appalling. Alvaston residents have again been let down by planning officers. Nobody bothered telling me."

Fellow Alvaston ward councillor Alan Graves, who has attacked the approval process, said: "It's a betrayal of people not to have made it clear earlier that it will house prisoners.

"They already feel let down by the whole planning process and now to find this out is disgraceful."

Madeline Hackett, who lives close to the development and lodged a complaint with the Government about the planning process behind it, said the lack of consultation rendered the community "impotent".

She said: "People have been alarmed by the development because the lack of consultation meant they didn't know who was going to be in there – it's fear of the unknown.

"We've been neutered. We feel that our rights as residents have been trampled all over."

Under planning law, applications can be approved without the finer details of what buildings are to be used for. Instead, planners look at applications in more general terms.

In the case of the City Gate development, they considered it as a "residential care and treatment facility".

The application did not mention prisoners because there was no legal requirement for it to do so.

Paul Clarke, the council's head of development control, said: "We were not told the unit was going to treat prisoners because in planning terms we didn't need to know.

"The fact that prisoners may be treated at the facility makes no difference to the security classification or any of the planning issues which were covered in the appraisal of the application."

Planning control committee chairman Councillor Robin Wood said: "That's the law and we have to abide by it. It's not for me to question the law. I'm not a lawmaker."

Private healthcare company Cygnet and NHS East Midlands Specialised Commissioning Group have both confirmed that patients at the unit could be referred by prison psychiatrists or they could have been mentally ill when they committed a crime and sent directly to the unit by the courts.

Kath Murphy, associate director of the commissioning group, which would be responsible for paying for the patients' care, said patients could have come from prison, from the courts, from high or medium-secure mental health hospitals following rehabilitation, or from the general community.

She said: "Some could pose a risk to members of the public but they shouldn't be there if the degree of risk can't be managed within the level of security provided.

"The likelihood is that, if they have committed a serious crime, the psychiatrist would recommend that they be sent to a medium or high-secure mental health unit for treatment."

Ms Murphy said security was needed to stop the patients from running away – for example if they were drug-users or did not want to be treated.

She was not aware of any escapes during the 18 months she had been involved in overseeing units of this type across the East Midlands.

Cygnet regional director Shaun Ramsey said that 30 of the 46 beds could cater for patients who needed to be in a "low secure" setting, such as prisoners. The rest would be used for people with less serious mental illness.

But he said he would not know how many of the 30 beds would be used by prisoners until patients started to be referred to the unit.

He hoped the unit would open in March and begin admitting patients in April.

The city already has 12 low-secure beds at Kingsway Hospital.

Mike Shewan, chief executive of Derbyshire Mental Health Services NHS Trust, said a small percentage of patients there were from prison or directly from court.

He said: "It's a relatively rare event for us."