A defrocked Church of England priest living in Skipton was declared a dangerous sex offender as he was jailed for four years.

Paul Clifford Battersby, 72, was before York Crown Court for evading police monitoring and for his fourth set of offences involving indecent images of children.

Lucy Brown, prosecuting, said some of the youngsters pictured in the images were as young as two years old.

Battersby had used computer wiping software to remove evidence of his online activities despite being banned from doing so under a sexual harm prevention order (SHPO) and a special kind of browser.

“You say you want to change,” Judge Simon Hickey told Battersby. “I find that difficult to accept, given, in my judgement, your deeply embedded behaviour.

“You deliberately flout any court order and attempts to rehabilitate yourself.”

Declaring him a dangerous offender, the judge said: “I am quite satisfied on the evidence before me – these offences and the deliberate way they were committed and the offences on three other occasions - you will go on to commit serious harm by the commission of further specified offences.”

Strengthening existing court-imposed restrictions on Battersby, the Judge ordered him to co-operate if police wanted him to take a lie detector test.

Twice-married Battersby, formerly of Blackburn and most recently of Spencer Walk, Skipton, pleaded guilty to three offences of having indecent images of children and one each of having extreme pornography, having prohibited images of children and breaching a sexual harm prevention order.

He held his face in his hands as he was given a seven-year extended prison sentence of four years imprisonment plus three years’ extended prison licence. For the rest of his life, he will be on the sex offenders’ register, barred from working or volunteering with children and vulnerable adults, and subject to a sexual harm prevention order.

The Church of England expelled him from its priesthood after his first sexual conviction. He had been a parish priest in Lancashire and at one point a principal officer in the Blackburn Diocese Board of Social Responsibility.

His barrister Helen Chapman said: “There is little that can really be said on his behaviour as mitigation.”

Battersby had pleaded guilty and wanted to do sex offender rehabilitation work in prison.

He had been homeless when he had been released from his last sentence and was “eventually housed in Skipton” she said. He didn’t know anyone in the area.

Ms Brown said North Yorkshire Police made an unannounced monitoring visit to Battersby’s home on October 6, 2020, and found a USB stick with extreme pornography on it.

A search of his home and computer equipment found 201 different images of the worst kind of child abuse, 83 of the middle category and 319 of the least serious category. There were 205 prohibited images, nine extreme videos and 13 extreme pornographic pictures.