A MOTHER-OF-THREE who cheated York taxpayers out of more than £20,000 by claiming benefits she was not entitled to has narrowly avoided being sent to jail.

Michelle Barrett, 29, was sentenced to 12 weeks in prison suspended for two years after pleading guilty to committing 18 offences of benefit fraud between October 2001 and August 2008.

Barrett, of Kent Road, in Selby, was living in York at the time she committed the fraud, first in Constantine Avenue and subsequently in Etty Avenue.

She was also sentenced to 240 hours of unpaid work, given a two-year supervision order and ordered to repay £2,000 to City of York Council.

“You have come very close to going straight into custody today,” said Mr Fithian-Franks, chair of the magistrates.

“Your children could have had their mother taken away from them and it would have been your doing and nobody else’s.”

Rachel Barker, prosecuting for the council, told the court how Barrett had fraudently claimed £16,959 of housing benefit and £3,747 of council tax benefit after failing to declare that her husband was living with her and working.

Mitigating, Keith Haggerty described how Barrett lived with an alcoholic husband who would go away on “binges” for weeks at a time.

He said: “For year after year he would spend all the money he got and then when he returned home after being away on a binge, he would take the defendant’s money and spend that as well.

“During 2003, her husband used to disappear not only for days, but weekends and a number of weeks. She would never know when he was going, where he had gone or when he was coming back.

“There was one period during 2003 to 2006 when he was away for six months solid and she was getting on with life as a single mother.

“She said she had found it easier not to go back to the council every time he came and went to alter her benefits claim and a lot of that has been because he kept spending her money as well as his own.

“She couldn’t live and support her children if she stopped the benefits.”