local news

Cruel mother in Malta holiday

A British mother who abandoned her three young sons, opting for a holiday for one in Malta, has been jailed for 15 months for child cruelty.

The woman, 29, had taken the children to school in the morning and stuck a note to her front door, asking her mother to look after them while she was away.

A UK court was told on Friday that after school, a friend of their mother’s took them to their grandmother’s home with nothing but the clothes they had on their backs.

However, when the grandmother went to retrieve fresh clothes from her daughter’s home, she found a squalid house filled with rubbish and the gas and electricity cut off. The mother, who cannot be named to protect her children, admitted to three charges of child cruelty. The boys, aged ten, seven and five, are in care and social workers expect them to be adopted.

A court in Newcastle was told that the mother, from North Shields on Tyneside, had not told her children she had planned a holiday in July last year.

She had paid for the trip with cash from her child benefit allowance and by selling her income support benefit book.

The prosecution said that the boys’ grandmother had previously refused to look after them, but on 11 July she was informed by a friend that their mother was in Malta and she had to collect them from school.

According to the grandmother, "The house was in an appalling state, dirty. Bags of rubbish were on the floor, cigarette ends everywhere, no washing facilities for the children and no sheets or bedding, not even a toothbrush.

There was broken glass on the floor and prescribed drugs lying around, readily available to the children. There was an empty fridge and the toilet needs no description."

The Judge told the mother she had shown a "callous disregard" for her sons’ welfare. "Anyone seeing the photographs of the house would be appalled by the conditions you allowed those children to live in," he added.