AN off licence manageress kept more than £1,700 which she should have banked and then claimed it had been stolen while she was shopping in a supermarket.

But since then Debra Watson has repaid nearly all of the money, a judge at Warwick Crown Court has heard.

Watson, 50, of Foster Avenue, Studley, was given a 12-month community rehabilitation order after pleading guilty to stealing a total of £1,759 from Wine Cellar Ltd.

Simon Phillips, prosecuting, said that at the time Watson was the manageress of the company's Booze Buster shop in High Street, Studley. As part of her job she was responsible for banking the takings, but in June last year the company became aware of irregularities in the banking.

So head office representative Jacqui Culverwell went to the shop to make some inquiries and it soon became clear the takings from June 9 and 10 had not been banked.

Watson claimed she had forgotten to do so and put the money in her own bag which had then been stolen while she was shopping in the town's Tesco store, and she repeated that story to the police when she was arrested.

Mr Phillips, who said Watson was previously of good character, added she had stolen a total of £1,759 - but had repaid all but £96 of it.

Darren Whitehead, defending, said the rest of it would be repaid after Watson received her first monthly pay check from her job working in a caf.

After reading a pre-sentence report on Watson, Judge Martin Coates commented: "It is not unusual that people in this lady's stage of life do steal, even without having regard to the matters I have read about in the report."

The judge, who had indicated at a previous hearing that he would not be jailing Watson, said that any custodial sentence for the offence would have been "fairly pointless" because it would have been very short.

Sentencing Watson and ordering her to pay £578 costs and £96 compensation, Judge Coates told her: "I made it clear that I did not think passing a custodial sentence on you would achieve anything at all.

"But I don't want you or anyone else to think that stealing money from people who give you work is not a serious matter, because it is. I am sorry to hear of your difficulties at home, and the principal aim of the order is to help you sort out your home situation."