A PENSIONER has been handed a night-time curfew for a £63,000 benefits fraud.

Gloria Doherty, of The Esplanade, Weymouth, fraudulently claimed £63,822 in state hand-outs over a period of ten years, Dorchester Crown Court was told.

The 64-year-old used her maiden name and two national insurance numbers to falsely claim income support, housing benefits, council tax benefits and pension credits from May 1999 to August 2009, the court was told.

Prosecutor Timothy Bradbury said that Doherty, who told the court she is physically disabled, worked in a Wetherspoons in Weymouth while still obtaining income support and housing benefits from Newport Council, in Wales, where she used to live.

He said: “The defendant obtained income support on the basis she was not working and in August 2007 she submitted a pension credit application on that same basis.

“She made a claim for housing benefit and failed to disclose that she was working and living in Weymouth, rather than Newport where the claim was made.

“Doherty had been claiming benefits under her maiden name and was paid on the basis that she was a single person incapable of working.

“An investigation was able to establish that since 1999, Doherty had been living at a property in Weymouth and was employed under her married name in a Wetherspoons public house as a kitchen assistant.

“The pension claim was fraudulent from the outset.”

In mitigation Timothy Shorter said the mother-of-two had been paying back £13 a week to the Department of Work and Pensions and £24 a month to Newport Council from the benefits she is currently claiming.

He said: “The defendant has been repaying from her very limited income, the amounts come out of her benefits.

“She accepts that she allowed herself to fall into the trap of continuing to receive benefits at a time when she knew she had ceased to be eligible.

“Her health has deteriorated and she has considerable mobility difficulties.

“It’s clear these offences fall well past the custody threshold and she has come prepared to be sent to prison.”

Judge Roger Jarvis told Doherty: “There are an awful lot of ordinary people getting up early and working very hard to pay all their taxes and obligations and it must be really annoying to those people to read about someone like you.

“The court would normally think of a custodial sentence of 36 weeks.

“You are obviously disabled and a woman with advancing years, taking these extra mitigating features into account it’s not proper for me to send you to prison.

“I’m going to take an exceptional course and impose a curfew.”

Doherty was sentenced to a six-month curfew between 7pm and 7am, a 12-month community order and was given a 24-week prison sentence suspended over 52 weeks.

She had pleaded guilty to charges of making a false representation and false accounting two counts of obtaining money transfer by deception, at Weymouth Magistrates Court on May 3.