Jailed, mother who forced children into ops they didn’t need
Why didn’t doctors spot it was benefits scam?
A JUDGE condemned doctors at a string of top hospitals for failing to stop a mother who forced her healthy children to have unnecessary operations in a benefits scam.
The jobless woman, who was jailed for seven-and-ahalf years yesterday, convinced them for ten years her children were suffering a host of serious conditions.
She persuaded surgeons to remove part of her youngest son’s stomach so feeding tubes could be fitted, while the 49year-old’s youngest daughter – who was still wearing nappies at 12 as a result of the cruel scam that cost taxpayers an estimated £1million – endured procedures for fake chronic asthma, urinary and stomach problems.
Judge Elizabeth Smaller, sentencing the woman at Croydon Crown Court in South London, said while one former GP, Dr Susanna Hart, did raise the alarm with consultants at some of Britain’s most prestigious hospitals where the children were being treated, her intervention in 2010 was ‘rebuffed’.
Senior medics at hospitals including Great Ormond Street, Chelsea and Westminster and Royal Brompton now face investigations into how the ‘obstructive and manipulative’ woman – who cannot be named for legal reasons – managed to run rings around the system until her arrest in 2013.
At a sentencing hearing yesterday, after being convicted of child cruelty and fraud, Judge Smaller said: ‘Dr Hart sounded an alarm bell about this mother in 2010, writing to those doctors to whom these children had been referred in the most esteemed teaching hospitals, only to find herself, as she says, rebuffed.
‘Eminent though those doctors are, and at the forefront of medicine in their respective fields, with only one exception what none of them did was pick up the phone and speak to Dr Hart.
‘It is a matter of regret that medical professionals at world-renowned hospitals did not maintain better communication.’
Detectives believe the scam started when one of the mother’s children fell ill genuinely and she realised it opened the door to extra benefits. Over ten years she ‘exaggerated and falsified’ a huge range of medical complaints, mainly focusing on breathing and eating difficulties, while ‘brainwashing’ her children into believing they were ill.
On one occasion her son was marched into a GP surgery dressed head-to-toe in yellow and carrying a yellow balloon. His mother insisted they were symptoms of autism.
But away from officials, she took her children to McDon- ald’s and Toby Carvery restaurants where they ate normally.
She used money from her fraud to furnish her £800,000 four-bedroom house in Surrey. She received £87,424 in disability living allowance between October 2003 and February 2014, and falsely claimed income support. The total claimed was £375,198.
On top of that, police found specialist NHS equipment and medicines worth more than £145,000. But the total cost to the taxpayer is likely to be in excess of £1million because of the vast number of hours, procedures and equipment wasted in the treatment of her healthy children.
Jailing her, Judge Smaller said she had also robbed her children of an ordinary childhood. ‘Who is to know what the effect will be on them in ten or 20 years, when they have children of their own,’ she told the mother.
‘I suspect only then will they realise what enormous trust is placed in a parent – and how you abused it. Despite everything, your children still love you, which makes your exploitation of their unconditional love and trust, for them, all the more serious and bewildering.’
The judge said the woman also enjoyed the attention and sympathy she got for struggling with such seemingly ill children.
‘Serious and bewildering’ ‘A matter of regret’