A LANDLORD caught breaking a driving ban twice in three days has been spared a trip to jail.

Warren Lee Oldfield’s original six-month driving ban has now been extended to nearly 17 months, York Magistrates Court heard.

Oldfield, 31, of Bell Farm Avenue, off Huntington Road, York, pleaded guilty to driving whilst disqualified and driving without insurance on the A64 at Malton on June 3.

Martin Butterworth, prosecuting, said Oldfield claimed to police that he didn’t know that he was a banned driver.

Last July, Oldfield was sentenced for driving whilst disqualified and driving without insurance on the A64 at Staxton on June 1.

District judge Adrian Lower told Oldfield: “It is difficult to believe that on June 3 you really didn’t understand you were banned from driving, given you had been stopped two days earlier for driving whilst disqualified.

“This was nothing other than a deliberate decision on your part to drive.”

He passed a 12-month community order with 10 days’ rehabilitative activities and 120 hours’ unpaid work and ordered Oldfield to pay a £95 statutory surcharge and £85 prosecution costs.

Oldfield said he would have problems doing the sentence as he worked from 9am to midnight seven days a week at his pub.

The district judge told him to train his staff to do his work so that he could do the sentence.

He also banned Oldfield for another six months, meaning that the landlord will have been continuously banned from February 23, 2020, to July 4, 2022.

“You don’t drive a motor vehicle on a road or public place until the ban is over,” the district judge told him. “You are acquiring a record for driving whilst disqualified. I hope you have turned the page.

“If you keep coming back to court for that kind of offence the court will run out of patience and realise there is only one way of dealing and sending you to prison.”

For Oldfield, David Camidge said he had had mental health problems last June which he had now sorted out.

“He is (today) a different person to the person who appeared before you in July last year,” he said.

Oldfield had recently taken over the running of a local pub and though he currently lives on Universal Credit, he would receive a percentage of the pub’s earnings from which he would have to pay his staff as well as himself.

The court heard Oldfield was banned for six months in February 2020 and couldn’t drive until August 22, 2020.

On July 21, the district judge gave him another six-month ban when he was fined for the June 1 offences.

The district judge was unaware on July 21 of the June 3 offences.