A contractor who had drunk eight pints of lager before crashing his van following an 80mph police chase in Redcar, has been spared jail.
Industrial cleaner Kevin Greenway, 25, said he could remember very little of the 4am drive last June.
Police saw his van swerving from side-to-side on West Dyke Road, Redcar, before it hit the kerb on a roundabout.
They switched on their blue lights and sirens but Greenway accelerated to 80mph in a 30mph zone, still swerving.
Prosecutor David Crook said that the vehicle bounced over speed bumps and it clipped the nearside kerb blowing two tyres.
Then it spun around and it wrecked a house porch and a garden wall, even damaging the passageway inside the home.
Greenway refused to take a breathalyser test.
Mr Crook added: “But he said that he had drunk eight pints of lager at a pub where he was staying.
“He could not recall much until he woke up in police custody.”
Greenway had been disqualified for 24 months just four months earlier.
Nicola Horton, defending, said that Greenway now acknowledged that he had been an alcoholic at the time.
His crash left the van a write-off and he had paid £1500 in insurance excess. His firm later went bust.
Miss Horton added: “I accept that it is a very poor account of driving, but he has since taken very great steps to change his life.
“He stopped drinking alcohol 10 months ago, and he lives with his girlfriend and their baby, and he has a new job.”
The judge told Greenway that he had just avoided going to prison for a year.
Judge Peter Bowers said: “You should know that my attitude to anyone involved in a police chase is that almost inevitably they receive a custodial sentence because they are a danger to the public.”
Greenway, of Bargoed, Glamorgan, was given a 12-month jail sentence suspended for 18 months with supervision, 200 hours unpaid work, banned for two years and until he passes an extended driving test, and ordered to pay £500 Prosecution costs and £400 compensation.
He pleaded guilty to dangerous driving on June 26, aggravated vehicle taking, driving while disqualified, and refusing to take a breathalyser test.
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