A BANNED driver who led police on a chase through busy housing estates was challenged by a judge: "Suppose you had left a child bleeding in the middle of the road, - dead."

James Thompson - said by his barrister to have a compulsion to get behind the wheel - was told he had driven like a lunatic on the sunny Sunday afternoon in Hartlepool in May.

Judge Sean Morris locked up the 26-year-old for ten months, and banned him from the road - his seventh disqualification since being a juvenile - for three years and five months.

The judge told him: "The maximum sentence is pitifully low. Get a grip. When you are going down those stairs, just thank heavens you're not going down for manslaughter."

Despite being disqualified and not having a proper licence, Thompson bought a BMW, and sped off in it when police tried to stop him, Teesside Crown Court heard today.

His lawyer, Matthew Collins, told the court Thompson has suffered from a longing to drive for "some time", and added: "It is a compulsion he has struggled to control.

"In 2014, he sought some assistance from Mind [the mental health charity] who helped him address his behaviour, and for more than a year he stayed off the roads.

"Prior to this offence, he had disengaged with Mind as a result of two things happening in his life - he was stopped from seeing his son, and his grandmother was ill.

"Those stresses resulted in, as he put it to me, a moment of madness. He had never been chased before and panicked. It is not an excuse, and he recognises that.

"He wants Your Honour to know his behaviour wasn't born out of a deliberate need to cause chaos or harm, but a man with a troubled history and troubled mind who panicked."

The court heard that Thompson had been a passenger in a car crash, and a counsellor had suggested that his fear of letting other people drive him could cause his condition.

Judge Morris told him: "I'm told you have a compulsion. Well, you're going to have to learn to resist your compulsion. Lots of people have compulsions they overcome.

"The trouble with you on this occasion is you drove like a lunatic, around a housing estate on a Sunday afternoon as children were playing in the street, swerving around police cars, tailgating other road-users, forcing them aside.

"Suppose you had left a child bleeding in the middle of the road - dead. That's what you've got to think of, sir, not yourself."

Thompson, whose address on the court file is Throston Grange Lane, but who Mr Collins said lived in Jesmond Gardens, both in Hartlepool, with his brother, admitted a charge of dangerous driving.