A YOUNG mother who left her five-year-old son home alone overnight has been jailed for 16 months.

The 25-year-old woman wept in the dock at York Crown Court yesterday as a judge said her actions amounted to an "act of abandonment" of a vulnerable child with complex medical needs.

The Honorary Recorder of York, Judge Paul Batty QC, said police had been called to the woman’s North Yorkshire home at just before 1am by a member of the public concerned about her erratic driving in a car which had narrowly missed parked vehicles.

The front door was unlocked and the boy was found asleep upstairs, but had he woken he could have been seriously injured by tools lying on the kitchen floor and a bottle of bleach with the top off.

The judge said one of the police officers attending had found the situation "alarming" and the matter was "seriously aggravated" by the woman’s conduct when police called her by telephone. She had said she was with a friend and would not be coming home that night.

She eventually returned home on a bicycle at 8am the next morning, and police arranged for the child to be looked after by relatives.

When interviewed by police, she said she had arranged for a babysitter that evening but this had been denied by the babysitter.

The judge said a report by a probation officer had said the woman had been "evasive" and there had been inconsistencies in her account.

The woman, who is not being identified to protect the child, had pleaded guilty at an earlier hearing to three charges of child neglect, one involving leaving him at home alone.

A second charge involved failing to keep four hospital appointments and failing to respond to 22 messages and texts from medical professionals and the third involved failing to tell her son’s school the nature of his medical condition and the need for him to be supervised at mealtimes.

The judge sentenced her to two years for leaving her son alone, reduced to 16 months for her early guilty plea, and two reduced sentences of eight months - to run concurrently - for the other two offences.

Graham Parkin had said in mitigation at an earlier hearing that the woman had attended all hospital appointments for three years and worked with medical professionals, but had been overwhelmed by the extra care needed for the child and had turned to alcohol to cope.

He said she felt the number of instructions she was being given for the boy’s care and their complexity became too much for her, adding: “She had cared for this child. She has done all she could and did it well until the child went to school.”