A semi-retired solicitor who was arrested after a row over the treatment of his elderly mother in a Bath hospital is now facing an extra charge.

The Crown Prosecution Service has added a count of battery to the public order offence charge laid after hospital staff objected to the way John Blanning complained about the treatment being given to his ailing mother.

Mr Blanning was handcuffed by police after a manager at the Royal United Hospital called in security officers to remove him from the ward where his 89-year-old mother Joan was being treated in June.

The 50-year-old refused to pay an on-the-spot fine and will be contesting both charges at a two-day trial before Bath magistrates court in November.

He says he has been told that the charge of battery has arisen because he is alleged to have pushed past one of the security guards.

The offence is used where someone is alleged to have unlawfully touched another person.

The father of three from Cornwall was initially just charged with committing an offence under section 5 of the Public Order Act, which covers threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour.

His frustration came to a head when a manager, worried about the spread of the sickness and diarrhoea norovirus, tried to stop him re-entering the ward where his mother – who has symptoms of advanced dementia and who lives in Keynsham – was being treated for a chest infection and dehydration.

Mr Blanning had been defending himself in court but has now engaged his own solicitor and says he believes the additional charge has come about because he challenged the legitimacy of the Section 5 accusation.

“The type of push that I’m talking about – whoever’s fault it was – is like that which happens when jostled in a crowd or if you bump into someone on the way into a crowded Marks and Spencer’s,” he claimed.

He has also been charged with two offences under the Bail Act after illness prevented him attending a case management hearing at the court earlier this month.

He said: “I find this to be amazing in an age of austerity, given that this matter will cost the public purse thousands of pounds, for a matter for which I was originally offered an £80 fixed penalty, but which I refused for the simple reason that I had not committed any offence.

“Given the hassle and inconvenience that this matter has caused me, I can understand why people just accept and pay a fixed penalty whether they are guilty or not. Where is the sense of justice in today’s judicial system?”

He said he felt he was being singled out by the CPS because he was a solicitor himself.

The CPS declined to comment on why the extra charge had been made against Mr Blanning.