The Bill will change the way patients are dealt with

The compromise comes on controversial plans to allow potentially dangerous people to be forced to get treatment, says the Health Service Journal.

The original draft Mental Health Bill was unveiled in 2002 and was attacked by psychiatrists and charities.

The Department of Health refused to comment on the reports of concessions.

It says the new version of the Bill will be published next month.

Psychiatrists say they would welcome the reported changes but say they are only "tinkering" and the plans remain damaging.

Restricted powers

Current laws make it impossible to detain people with personality disorders who have committed no offence.

The loophole caused outrage in the case of Michael Stone, who was diagnosed with a severe personality disorder years before he murdered Lin Russell and her six-year-old daughter, Megan.

Original proposals for changing the law included making people with severe personality disorders get help without their consent through Community Treatment Orders (CTOs).

FORCED TREATMENT POWERS If people previously detained for psychiatric care If people also judged risk to themselves or others Clinicians decide whether legitimate

According to new reports, the revised draft Bill will say CTOs can only be used for people previously detained for psychiatric care.

The patients would also have to be judged as a risk either to themselves or to others.

The psychiatric establishment is divided on whether dangerous and severe personality disorders can be treated.

Prison orders

The journal says the new proposals sidestep that issue, instead allowing the clinician making the compulsory order to decide whether their actions are legitimate.

Plans to use CTOs in prisons have also reportedly been dropped.

Winterton has been engaged in talks over the plans

The changes follow regular meetings between health minister Rosie Winterton and charities, psychiatrists and other interested groups.

Government officials say it has taken a long time to publish the revised plans because they have considered more than 2,000 views, many of them strongly-worded.

They also argue it is the first overhaul of the legislation since the 1950s, with the 1983 Mental Health Bill only an update of previous laws.

'Fundamentally wrong'

The new plans will now go to a special committee of MPs and peers set up to examine the plans before ministers try to get them through Parliament.

A Department of Health spokesman said: "We will not comment on the new draft until it is published."

Critics of the original plans argued they would backfire as more compulsory detentions and forced treatments in the community would drive people away from seeking services.

Tony Zigmond, vice-president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said the changes were a step in the right direction.

But he told BBC News Online: "The problem is that the Bill is fundamentally wrong and this sort of tinkering, while making it less damaging, does not stop it being damaging."

Dr Zigmond said people who were fully able to make decisions should not be forced to have treatment.

Movie parallels

He challenged the idea that people with mental illnesses were more dangerous.

"For every person who is killed by someone who has mental illness, 20 are killed by someone who has not.

"At any one time, one in six people suffer from mental illness - so people with mental illness are less dangerous than those who are not."

Andy Bell, from the Mental Health Alliance, said the reported changes would be "extremely good news".

But he said the alliance had 14 remaining concerns, including worries the new laws would mean people were locked up for what they might do in the future, like in the film Minority Report.

"If this is the only major change, it is a matter of major concern," he said.