9:11am Monday 13th July 2009
Dole cheat mum Deborah Church has been jailed for 21 months after a judge heard how she falsely claimed as much as £60,000 in benefits.
The 48-year-old, of Tinkers Filed, Wootton Bassett, who has a long history of deception, plundered tens of thousands of pounds claiming she was a single mum for about a decade.
But in reality she was living with the father of her children who was running a business as a builder.
And when the relationship collapsed into acrimony he tipped off the Department of Work and Pensions after discovering she had been claiming.
Simon Burns, prosecuting, told Swindon Crown Court Church had been living with partner Anthony McKenna from the start of 1993 through to June 2006.
The couple lived as a couple in Ermin Street for all of the time, he said, apart from a short period when she was in hospital and a couple of brief separations.
He said the files from 1997 to 1999 were no longer available but during that time she had been claiming to be living alone with her children.
Computer records from June 2001 to June 2006 showed she had claimed £26,798 she wasn’t entitled to with a six month gap at the end of 2005.
Church also claimed more than £10,260 in housing benefit from the local council in the late nineties.
Mr Burns said that on top of the £37,000 which could be accounted for it was estimated she dishonestly received about £20,000 in benefits from 1993 to 1999.
He told the court “This is a 48-year-old woman who the Crown would say has certain experience because of her record for dishonesty. This is not a case of an amateur making a mistake.”
In January 2007 she was put on a conditional discharge for using cheques and credit cards belonging to Mr McKenna.
She was jailed for four years in 1991 for a deception where she set up an employment agency and took £58,000.
The money was spent on luxuries and she was ‘described as something like a character from Dynasty,’ he said.
And in 1989 she was jail for two years after being convicted in Scotland of obtaining £90,000 from a building society.
Church pleaded guilty to obtaining a credit transfer by deception and three counts of making a false representation to obtain benefits and asked for a fourth to be taken into consideration.
Michael Forward, defending, said his client had children aged twelve and ten years old and had been in relationship with Mr McKenna for about 15 years.
In 2004 he said the couple had been planning to emigrate to Australia when Mr McKenna was assaulted in the town centre and left with a fractured skull.
The relationship broke down acrimoniously soon after and she was convicted before the magistrates for the use of his cheques.
In recent years he said she had tried to volunteer in charity shops in Wootton Bassett but had been asked to leave after they had been told of her past.
He said she remarried this year and the more serious convictions were two decades ago.
Jailing her Judge Charles Wade said “In my view this is a case where you committed these frauds, because that is what they are, quite deliberately and systematically.
“There were times when you could have what the true position was. You didn’t do so; you went on making this claim over a long period of time resulting in the very substantial loss to the department and to the public purse.”
© Copyright 2001-2012 Newsquest Media Group
http://www.thisiswiltshire.co.uk