A MAN with a history of voyeurism has been told “the time has come” for him to understand the seriousness of his crimes.

Philip Harper was yesterday jailed for 28 months for spying on women for sexual gratification. The 45-year-old, of Edinburgh Way, Banbury, was caught watching a woman in a changing room at the town’s Spiceball swimming pool last August. He has 15 previous convictions.

In June, while awaiting trial, Harper was caught standing on a flower pot and looking into the bedroom of a ground floor flat in Banbury.

Harper, who admitted a charge of voyeurism and breaching an antisocial behaviour order, was told by Judge Peter Ross at Oxford Crown Court: “The time has come for you to understand that the court will not condone repeated offences of this type.

“This is real, and this is very much the impact that this sort of offending has on people.

“The fact that you have not touched someone does not in some way lessen the effect upon those who you have spied on.”

The court heard a woman had taken her two children to the swimming pool on August 17, 2013, and while she was changing out of her costume she noticed a man watching her from the gap between the floor and the cubicle wall.

While awaiting trial, on June 7 he was found looking through a bedroom window of a ground floor flat by a man who lived there with his partner.

Harper, who appeared in court via video link from Bullingdon Prison, near Bicester, was sentenced to 16 months for the count of voyerism at the swimming pool, four months for the breach of his Asbo and eight months for the count of voyerism in June, to run consecutively.

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