The parents who forced their five children to live in squalor have been jailed for three-and-a-half years.
Scott Higgins, 42, and Lisa Doxey, 39, starved their children so they had more money to buy drugs and let the family home become so filthy it horrified even seasoned police officers.
The walls and floors of their Grimsby, Lincolnshire, home were covered in urine, faeces, dirty clothes and rubbish and the mattresses the children slept on were “crawling with lice”, a court heard.
There was no food in the house and all five children were suffering from head lice and bed bugs. The court heard the older kids had been shoplifting to feed themselves and their younger siblings.
“The house was in a thoroughly disgusting state and was not habitable, even for an animal, and the children were neglected and, more importantly, exposed to significant harm because of those conditions,” prosecution barrister Richard Butters said.
An anonymous tip-off alerted police to the squalid conditions in the home last April.
Higgins and Doxey pleaded guilty to five counts of child cruelty dating from September 2011 to April 2014.
Doxey was the mother of all five kids – girls now aged 15, 12, six and two, and a boy aged four – and Higgins was the father of the three youngest.
The children are now “doing well” in foster homes.
