A teenager who started two blazes at a Keighley children's home and robbed a boy has won the right to a reduced sentence.

The "difficult and disruptive" youth, then aged 15, was ordered to be detained indefinitely in youth custody when he appeared at Bradford Crown Court last November.

But the Court of Appeal yesterday reviewed the sentence saying he should spend six years in custody instead.

The Recorder of Liverpool, Judge David Clarke, said that the remarks made by the sentencing judge showed he was troubled by the course of action he felt he had to take.

But the appeal judge, sitting in London with Lord Justice Bantell and Mr Justice Gray, said Judge Hall had proceeded to sentence without the benefit of full and up-to-date psychiatric reports on the teenager.

Judge Clarke said recent reports indicated that, although there was much work to be done, the signs were hopeful. There was insufficient material to justify the imposition of an indeterminate sentence.

The teenager, who cannot be named for legal reasons, set light to Ingrow House children's home in Keighley and robbed a boy aged 11 who he had first frog-marched into woodland, stripped and beaten.

The attack was serious and humiliating and the fires at the homes were dangerous, said the appeal judge.

But he agreed with the defence claim that Judge Hall, without the assistance of full medical reports, had substituted his own view that the teenager represented a real danger to the public.

Bradford Crown Court heard last November that the fire at the home in May was the third in the space of two months at the home. There was also a blaze at the garage.

It was the youth's first time before a court and his lawyer, Kirsty Watson, said that to impose an indeterminate sentence took away from him any hope of being released.

A second teenager aged 17, who also lived at the home, was sentenced to three and a half years in a young offenders institution after he admitted being involved in the arson attack on the garage and also setting fire to his room just 13 days before the youth.

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