A Select Committee of the House of Commons had recommended the erection of a national asylum for criminal lunatics in 1807. In 1810, the Governors of Bethlem, who were at that time planning the building of the third Bethlem Hospital at St George's Fields, were approached by the Secretary of State for the Home Department with a proposal to provide secure accommodation for criminal lunatics in a new wing of the building. An agreement was hammered out over the next four years, in which the Home Department would be responsible for the government of State Criminal Lunatic Asylum, and would pay for the erection of the new wing of the hospital in which it would be housed, and for the maintenance and medical care of patients; and the hospital would provide the requisite facilities, and the majority of its medical personnel and care (all paid for by the state). In effect day-to-day control of the Asylum rested with the Bethlem physician acting in accordance with statute. The two criminal blocks were opened in 1816, and criminal patients were kept entirely isolated from patients in the main hospital. Admission to and discharge from the State Criminal Lunatic Asylum was by warrant of the Secretary of State, and quarterly reports on criminal patients were made to the Secretary of State by the Bethlem physician. Returns continued to be made until the 1880s, despite the transfer of the majority of criminal patients to Broadmoor by 1864, and the subsequent demolition of the wing of the hospital in which they were housed, because a small number of criminal patients were kept at Bethlem Royal Hospital.