R v Ian James Fairfield

This is an appeal against sentence brought by leave of the Single Judge.

On 2 February 2026 in the Crown Court at Liverpool, the appellant (now aged 53) was sentenced by Ms Recorder Amy Nicholson to a term of 16 months' immediate imprisonment for an offence of non-domestic burglary committed against the background of the Southport riots in July 2024. There were concurrent sentences of one month imprisonment for offences of possessing cannabis and cultivating cannabis. The appellant had pleaded guilty to all the offences in the Magistrates' Court and had been committed to the Crown Court for sentence. The sole ground of appeal is that the sentence should have been suspended.

The facts of the burglary must be seen in their full context. In short, the appellant was one of many individuals who broke into and looted a Mini Mart shop amid scenes of grave public disorder in Southport on the evening of 30 July 2024. He was captured on CCTV inside the shop with many others, ransacking the shelves and stealing whatever they could carry away. The appellant stole a crate of beer.

Following the tragic events that took place in Southport on 29 July 2024, with the murder of three little girls at their dance class, there were incidents of large-scale public disorder across the country. The following day, 30 July, the community in Southport came together to hold an evening vigil for the victims of the tragedy. It commenced at about 6.00 pm. Many others in another part of Southport began engaging in anti-social behaviour and public disorder, the focus of the violence and disorder being the town's mosque.

The crowd started to gather outside the mosque just after 7.00 pm. Police officers responded and formed a protective cordon to separate the crowds that had gathered. The main disorder came from the crowd on St Luke’s Road; a second crowd formed behind a line of police personnel carriers on Sussex Road. The second crowd was close to the Windsor Mini Mart, the shop which was attacked and looted in the appellant's offence of burglary. That was one of several shops that were looted. There was also substantial damage caused to residential property and to the mosque.

Police officers estimated that there were about a thousand people involved in the violent disorder, which was accompanied by appalling racist chants. Fifty police officers were injured. Police vehicles were damaged. The clean-up operation cost the local authority some £17,000. Local businesses suffered serious financial loss.

That is the context in which the appellant's offence was committed.

There is no suggestion that the appellant was taking any part in the violent disorder itself; his involvement was limited to taking part in looting this one shop.

The police set up an operational team of officers to review a huge quantity of CCTV footage. It was this that led eventually to the identification of the appellant as one of those involved in the burglary at the Windsor Mini Mart. We have watched the CCTV for ourselves.

The store came under attack as people wearing face coverings destroyed the shutters to gain entry using a concrete or metal pillar, bricks and a sledgehammer. That was at 9.30 pm. At 9.33 pm the appellant can be seen on CCTV entering the store with many others. He can be seen pulling at a shelf on one of the displays and then leaving the shop holding a box of beer and other items. He can be seen trying to cover his face. He was identified positively from a still image taken from the CCTV and in particular by a prominent scar on the side of his head.

The owner of the store had locked up and left earlier that evening before the trouble began, neighbours having alerted him that crowds were forming with the risk of trouble. He had worked at the shop for several years and had lived in this country for 25 years. He was a hard-working family man, a member of the local community, and someone who contributed positively to society. He watched the CCTV from home as the events unfolded that evening. He and his family were very badly affected by the whole incident, psychologically and financially. He estimated the damage to the shop was £5,000 to £6,000 and there were other losses he put at £15,000 including missing stock.

Once the appellant had been identified on the CCTV footage, police officers attended his home address on 10 September 2025, some 14 months after the incident. They conducted a search of the property and found a quantity of cannabis consistent with personal use and a total of seven cannabis plants growing. Clothing and footwear which he had been wearing at the time of the burglary were seized.

In respect of the burglary the appellant was arrested at his home. He said after caution: "I only took a crate from in there and gave it to someone outside". When he was interviewed at the police station and the CCTV footage was played to him he accepted that he was the person the police were pointing out as him. He said he was not there to riot, and was only in Southport because his sister lived there. He accepted that he damaged a shelf in the shop and took the box of beer. He said he does not drink and thought he had picked up soft drinks.

The appellant entered his guilty pleas at his first appearance in the Magistrates' Court on 17 October 2025. He was therefore entitled to full credit of one-third for his pleas. There was a delay in his being sentenced at the Crown Court because of the subsequent deterioration in his mental health, to which we shall return.

The appellant had no previous convictions for dishonesty. In 2015 he had received a suspended sentence of 6 months' imprisonment for an offence of section 20 wounding, apparently committed in a domestic context against his daughter's ex-boyfriend. His only other court appearance had been in June 2024 for a driving offence, for which he was fined and disqualified.

There was a pre-sentence report which recommended a community order with a rehabilitation activity requirement. The report referred to the appellant's history of mental health issues, dating back to an episode ten years earlier when he was working as a taxi-driver and had been the victim of an armed robbery.

The pre-sentence report had been prepared for the Magistrates' Court appearance on 17 October 2025. It confirmed that the appellant attended a hospital Accident & Emergency Unit in November 2024, reporting suicidal thoughts and visual hallucinations. That would have been just a few months after the burglary. No in-patient admission was needed at that stage and he was discharged back into the community.

Following his appearance in the Magistrates' Court in October 2025 the appellant's mental health deteriorated sharply. This was described in a report from the consultant psychiatrist who saw him on his discharge. On 20 October 2025 family members had brought the appellant to the Accident & Emergency Department after discovering a suicide note. On examination at hospital he was deemed to lack insight and capacity and was detained under section 2 of the Mental Health Act 1983 for further assessment and treatment.

He remained in hospital for nearly a month before being discharged on 17 November 2025. By then his mental health had been quite stable for some time. He was diagnosed as suffering from a recurring depressive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and epilepsy which was stable with treatment by medication. There was also cognitive impairment, possibly secondary to epilepsy, and depression. The prognosis was uncertain but he was prone to another depressive or anxiety episode. His resilience and coping skills were poor. Support by his family, and monitoring by the community mental health team, were recommended. The psychiatrist expressed the opinion that a prison disposal would probably be detrimental and the appellant would struggle to manage in such an environment.

On the strength of that psychiatrist's report there was an addendum pre-sentence report dated 27 January 2026. The appellant was receiving positive support from his family, his medication was working, he had regular visits from his allocated community psychiatric nurse as well as seeing a psychiatrist fortnightly. The probation officer's recommendation remained as before. It was not considered that a mental health treatment requirement would be appropriate as he was already receiving necessary mental health support in the community. Probation intervention and the proposed rehabilitation activity requirement could be used to encourage the appellant to engage with the health agencies.

In her sentencing remarks the judge described the context of the burglary offences in some detail. She said that the appellant clearly knew what he was doing when he went into the shop and helped himself to the crate of beer. He clearly knew that what he was doing was wrong and that he had no place being there at the scene at all; he did not live in Southport. The judge concluded that the appellant was attracted to the violence that day, went to look, and then became involved, although the judge specifically noted that he was not participating in the wider violent disorder. She said that the fact that he was attempting to cover his face in the shop showed that he knew that what he was doing was wrong.

Turning to the Sentencing Council guideline for Burglary, the judge said that the offence fell within category B1 which has a starting point of 12 months' custody and a range of up to 2 years. She found that the offence was aggravated by the context she had outlined and that notwithstanding his personal mitigation a sentence at the top of the range was appropriate. She said it could have been elevated to category A1 but, noting the applicant's mental health, she had made the necessary reduction. The sentence would therefore be 2 years discounted by one-third for the early guilty plea: therefore 16 months.

Turning to the question of suspension the judge said:

We are grateful to Ms Beesley for her written and oral submissions. She submits, as she submitted to the judge, that in view of the clear recommendations in the pre-sentence report and in the psychiatric report, custody was not the right environment for a man of the appellant's mental instability. She acknowledges in her grounds of appeal that he was not undergoing a psychotic episode at the time of the offence but she submits that his life was clearly punctuated by post-traumatic stress disorder and hearing voices which the probation officer had noted to be a contributing factor to his emotional immaturity and compulsive nature.

Ms Beesley accepts that the offence was properly placed in category B1, with a range from a high-level community order up to 2 years' custody. She submits however that the court should have taken the exceptional course of a suspended sentence order. She submits the judge was wrong to impose a sentence of immediate custody. She acknowledges that the Southport riot cases usually warrant immediate custody but this, she submits, should not be viewed as a rule for all. In her grounds of appeal she expressed concern that the appellant's vulnerability could result in a further episode of deterioration in his mental health.

In her oral submissions this morning, Ms Beesley has focused upon the relevance again of his mental health problems. She submits that the judge paid insufficient attention to the Mental Health guideline in conducting the balancing exercise, and to the Imposition guideline, and that in effect this factor should have tilted the scales in favour of suspension.

In granting leave to appeal the Single Judge directed the preparation of a prison report. We have a report from the appellant's offender manager at HMP Berwyn dated 28 March 2026. It is plain from that report that great care has been taken to keep the appellant under close observation in view of his mental health issues and previous threats of self-harm. Some three weeks into his sentence his mood and behaviour took a particularly concerning turn and he had to be placed on constant supervision 24-hours a day. During this time he was reporting experiencing visual and auditory hallucinations, suicidal ideation and was showing signs of unpredictable behaviour.

Happily, by 10 March following appointments with prison medical staff, the psychiatrist and the medical health team, it is reported that "his mindset, thinking and behaviour had all improved immeasurably" and he was removed from constant supervision. The report confirms that the appellant has conducted himself appropriately at all times and has engaged fully with all available support. As the report puts it: "He appears to have reaped the resultant benefits". In his most recent review meeting it was recorded that the appellant spoke positively about his future and about his family relationships; he said that the prison staff had been “amazing and very understanding with him”.

We have considered carefully counsel's submissions. As the judge acknowledged at the outset of her sentencing remarks, the sentencing task she faced was not straightforward. She clearly gave the matter very careful consideration indeed and had the Mental Health guideline firmly in mind.

We agree that it would have been wholly unrealistic to view the appellant's actions in committing this offence in isolation from the actions of others. The context in which the offence was committed was crucial. There was no good reason for the appellant to have been present at the scene of this violent disorder. Putting it at its most charitable, he attended out of curiosity; but there was no excuse for involving himself actively in a significant part of the

disorder by joining in this mindless looting of a shop. The CCTV we have watched shows an appalling scene of lawlessness in which the appellant was playing a willing part.

We do not consider that the appellant's mental health issues can be said to have reduced in any way his culpability for his actions. At most they provided some general mitigation, as the judge recognised in the extracts we have read from her sentencing remarks.

In deciding whether the sentence could be suspended the judge had to follow the guidance in the Imposition of Community and Custodial Sentences guideline. The guideline required the court to weigh the relevant factors specified in the guideline, balancing the factors for and against suspension. As this Court has made clear on several occasions it is not a question of whether the number of factors in favour of suspension outweighs the number of factors against suspension. Factors will have different weight. One factor against suspension may outweigh all other factors in favour of suspension.

That is the position in this case. The judge was entitled to take the view that the seriousness of the burglary offence seen in its proper and full context meant that appropriate punishment could only be achieved by immediate custody. She made it clear in her sentencing remarks that this was the conclusion she had reached. That factor outweighed any factors in favour of suspension, in particular the appellant's personal mitigation, including his mental health problems which amounted (in the words of the guideline) to "strong personal mitigation”.

It is not for this Court to substitute its own conclusion in weighing the factors in the guideline. The guideline gives the sentencing judge that discretion. This Court will only interfere with a decision of this kind where it is plainly wrong in principle or results in a sentence that is manifestly excessive : see R v Tharmaratnam [2017] EWCA Crim 887; [2017] 2 Cr App R (S) 36, and R v Hussain [2019] EWCA Crim 1542; [2020] 1 Cr App R (S) 32.

In our view, it cannot be said that the judge's decision not to suspend the sentence was plainly wrong in principle or that it has resulted in a sentence that is manifestly excessive.

Accordingly and despite Ms Beesley’s attractive and focused submissions, the appeal must be dismissed.