A team of gas engineers discovered a big cannabis farm when they called at a Bradford house to investigate why the energy bills weren’t being paid.

One looked through the letterbox and saw Hieu Van Nguyen hiding on the floor of the property in Chelmsford Terrace, Barkerend, Bradford Crown Court heard today.

The engineers gained access to the address and called the police when they saw it had been turned into a cannabis farm, prosecutor Daniel Ingham said.

Nguyen, 34, a Vietnamese national with no fixed address in the United Kingdom, left the house but kept returning to collect his clothes.

The gas engineers gave his description to the police and he was spotted walking off while on his phone and looking back at the house, Mr Ingham said.

The police found a total of 382 cannabis plants at the address, including 238 seedlings concealed in a cupboard. There were also the usual transformers, fans and lights found at commercial drugs farms and the electricity meter had been bypassed.

There were transformers in the cellar and cannabis plants on the remaining three floors.

A small living area contained a single mattress, a fridge freezer and cooking equipment.

Mr Ingham said that the fact that Nguyen was left alone in charge of such a valuable grow was an indication that he was a trusted gardener.

Nguyen at first told interviewing officers that he was the victim of modern slavery but went on to plead guilty to production of cannabis when he appeared before the crown court.

His barrister, Adam Walker, said his client had no previous convictions or cautions.

“He has undergone significant hardship and his troubles are far from over,” Mr Walker said.

If he was deported he would be in a lot of trouble when he returned to his homeland.

“There can be trust and compulsion and the greater the degree of compulsion, the less the need for trust,” Mr Walker pointed out.

Nguyen’s lack of knowledge of this country gave him little room to look at the alterna-tives that might have been open to him instead of tending to the plants.

Mr Walker urged the court to accept that Nguyen’s was a lesser role in the operation and he asked Recorder Judy Dawson to pass as short a jail sentence as possible.

She imprisoned Nguyen for 15 months, saying he was looking after “a large-scale and sophisticated operation” that would have yielded a substantial amount of cannabis for commercial purposes.