A MOTHER seriously injured her young daughter when she drove while talking on the phone, York Magistrates Court heard.

The 33-year-old woman crashed into a wall as she made the school run, said district judge Adrian Lower.

She was concentrating so much on the argument she was having on her phone that she wasn’t watching the road, and she had been drinking alcohol.

Neither of the two children in her car were secured in booster seats as they should have been because of their age and size.

The daughter, who goes to a primary school, was so badly injured, she had to be taken to hospital following the crash in Acomb last October.

“I don’t know how a parent begins to make it up to a child for this sort of offence,” district judge Adrian Lower told her.

“Your daughter is always likely to ask you questions about what happened. You will have to live with the effects of what you did forever more.”

The mother, who is not being named to protect the children, of west York, pleaded guilty to causing serious injury by dangerous driving.

She was banned from driving for two years, ordered to take an extended driving test before driving unsupervised again.

She was also given a two-year community order with 30 days’ rehabilitative activities and ordered to pay a £95 statutory surcharge and £85 prosecution costs.

For the mother, Andrew Craven did not give any mitigation after the judge indicated the kind of sentence he would pass. The judge read a detailed probation report about the mother.

It gave details about her difficult upbringing without proper parenting and her jobs, including working in a brothel answering phones.

The judge said the mother had serious debts and had been a victim of domestic abuse.

She had turned to alcohol to try and cope with her problems.

Social services had been involved with the family following the crash, but had decided to let her keep looking after her daughter.