A LYING former midwife who pocketed £25,000 in benefits with a series of frauds got away with her “unsophisticated” con for years despite a glaring blunder.

Margaret Briggs, 54, used pro-forma stationery with a 2007 copyright date on the back of it – claiming if was a tenancy agreement from two years earlier.

Her barrister told Teesside Crown Court that local authorities might have been so under-staffed and overworked that the give-away clue simply went unnoticed.

Mother-of-five Briggs illegally claimed Housing Benefit and Council Tax relief for the five-bedroomed rented property in Boltby, near Thirsk, North Yorkshire.

The court heard that she also lied about the number of her children who were living with her, and that she had income from jobs as a midwife and a chambermaid.

Catherine Ellis, mitigating, said she spent the money on rent and household bills rather than things such as jewellery, flashy cars or expensive holidays.

And she told Judge Tony Briggs: “The tenancy agreements would not have been accepted if someone had had the chance to look at them in rather more detail.”

Judge Briggs said there was no evidence of a conspiracy with the landlord, which he said had been a common crime “for those old enough to remember”.

Briggs produced false rent books and tenancy forms several times, saying she was paying £975 a month then £1,200 a month when the real figure was £600.

During a review in 2011, she claimed that all of her children were living with her when just two were, prosecutor Penny Bottomley told the court.

She did not declare employment at various times as a midwife, a cleaner and a chambermaid; and doctored documents about the education of some of her children.

The court heard how Briggs lost her job as a nurse when she was prosecuted for cruelty to horses, and has previous convictions for fraud and dishonesty.

The grandmother was jailed for three months in 2014 for perverting the course of justice – providing a bogus character reference purporting to be from an employer.

She is now living “in the middle of nowhere” to escape local gossip, is close to completing a degree course, and has joined the RAF Reserve, Miss Ellis said.

“The nature of the RSPCA prosecution meant she was not then comfortable living in a village where everyone knew her business,” the barrister added.

“She prefers, therefore, to live somewhere where she doesn’t have others’ disproval affecting her day-to-day business. She has a simple life and doesn’t need much.”

Briggs, now of Deep Ghyll Mallerstang, in Kirkby Stephen, Cumbria, was given a 15-month suspended prison sentence after admitting dishonestly retaining credit.

She was also put on Probation Service supervision for the two-year period of suspension, and ordered to carry out 100 hours of unpaid community work.

Judge Briggs said: “I have been rather puzzled by your case. You are clearly an intelligent woman capable of rational thought, and you continue to put yourself in a position where the only way out, you seemed to think, was to commit criminal offences of fraud.

“It went on for quite a long time, and included you producing false documents of an unsophisticated and very unconvincing nature.

“One thing that seems to shout from it, if I can put it bluntly, is the absence of a considerable sense of reality.