A YORK hospice fundraiser was today jailed for 12 months for a £38,000 benefit fraud.

Tony Stevenson, prosecuting, said Charlotte Ann McCulloch, 61, had worked as a waitress and booking agent for more than one company over a five-and-a-half year period while claiming that she was medically unfit to work.

As she wept in the dock at York Crown Court, he described how she had continued her fraud after benefit officials became suspicious in 1997 and questioned her. She denied their allegations and they dropped the investigation.

In the spring of 2001, officials reopened the case and gained proof of how she had cheated her way to between £80 and £120 a week from mid-1995 until her detection.

McCulloch, of Hob Moor Terrace, off Tadcaster Road, was so overcome by her punishment that she could not at first descend the dock steps to the cells.

She had pleaded guilty to four offences of benefit fraud.

Jailing her for 12 months, The Honorary Recorder of York, Judge Paul Hoffman, said: "This was a long-term and pretty blatant fraud."

He rejected pleas by her barrister, Andrew Stranex, to suspend the sentence on medical and other grounds.

St Leonard's Hospice sent the court a letter on behalf of McCulloch, who raised thousands of pounds for the hospice over more than a decade of fundraising, and the judge referred to her many years of working for charity.

Earlier, Mr Stevenson told how McCulloch started claiming income support in February, 1995, after a period of illness that prevented her doing her normal work as a waitress.

A benefits adjudication officer allowed her to earn £20 a week without reducing her benefit after a doctor declared it would be therapeutic for her to book waitresses for functions.

But McCulloch also attended functions as a supervisor, booked waitresses for more than one catering company and at times worked as a waitress herself.

Mr Stevenson said she was paid in cash, and quoted one week when she earned £225. He also quoted waitresses who said she had booked them each for 120-plus functions over two years.

Mr Stranex said that McCulloch was someone who was always willing to help. She was essentially a booking agent, but when staff numbers were low or extra hands were needed she would turn waitress herself.

She was a hardworking, proud woman, who had never been in trouble before she started the fraud.

Updated: 14:36 Monday, March 31, 2003