A convicted sex offender told Oxford jurors that CCTV showing him on his mobility scooter followed through his hotel lobby by two teenagers was ‘inadvertent’ contact.

Alan Thompson, 56, said he had been speaking to the two children outside the Premier Inn, watched by the girl’s mother – who he claimed knew about the fact he was a convicted sex offender.

A court order first imposed a decade and a half ago prevents him from contact with under-18s unless with the consent of the child’s guardian or where contact is inadvertent or not reasonably avoided in the course of daily life.

He had gone back into the hotel to drop off his mobility scooter before going for a drive with the pair and the adult. The two children followed him into the hotel to use the toilet, Oxford Crown Court was told.

Giving evidence on Monday afternoon, Thompson told jurors: “As far as I was aware they were going to go to the toilet?”

“Were you with them at that point?” he was asked by his barrister James Hay. No, he replied.

Mr Hay asked: “Was this any kind of joint trip to the toilet?” Thompson confirmed that it was not.

Asked how he would characterise the contact shown in the footage, he said it was ‘inadvertent’ – echoing the language of his court-issued sexual offences prevention order.

The defendant was adamant that he would ‘never, ever, ever be left on my own’ with the girl seen on the CCTV. “No way,” he said. “I wouldn’t even have bothered applying for consent because it just – it just wouldn’t happen.”

The boy, whose family Thompson had known since the 1980s, would sometimes see him without a chaperone as he ‘had consent for that’.

Oxford Mail:

Thompson claimed to have told the girl’s mother about the fact he was on the sex offender register during a walk into Oxford along the Abingdon Road in September 2020 – two months before the hotel incident in November.

Explaining the decision to tell her about the conviction, he said: “I felt that to be on the safe side; it was better that I told her than she find out later.”

That was put to the woman herself, who flatly denied that such a conversation had taken place.

Putting his client’s case, Mr Hay told the mum that Thompson had said there was something he needed to tell her.

“He said to you: ‘I’m on the sex offender register as a convicted sex offender,’” the barrister said. She replied: “No, he never told me nothing.”

Mr Hay, continuing with his client’s account of the exchange, said: “And you replied ‘how long ago, Alan’ and he replied to you ‘September 2007’.” The woman said he was ‘telling lies’.

“You said, your response [was] ‘okay, thanks for telling me, we’ll leave it in the past where it belongs’,” the defence barrister said.

The woman repeated her earlier comment that she ‘didn’t know nothing about his background’.

Thompson, of Long Wittenham, denies breaching a sexual offences prevention order. The trial continues.