A SOCIAL worker who forgot to inform her regulator of a drink-driving conviction has escaped with a caution.

Martina Parr was driving home after a night out in Clitheroe in 2015 when she crashed her car into a roundabout, a Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) fitness to practice panel was told.

Parr was later convicted of driving with excess alcohol by East Lancashire magistrates and banned from the roads for 22 months, as well as being ordered to pay a £370 fine and £85 court costs.

But the hearing was told she failed to inform the HCPC of the matter until she applied for a social work post with Bradford City Council in March 2017.

Her father had also completed an online registration form with the watchdog in 2016, which failed to disclose the court appearance.

Parr told the panel she had been told by police and the court at the time that the HCPC would be informed of her conviction.

She said she had felt "humiliated" as a result of the court proceedings and later she had not returned to social work for some time.

Because she was attending to an elderly relative, with health issues, in Austria, she had relied on her father completing her paperwork with the regulator.

He also wrote a letter to the panel, confirming his actions, and she accepted she had been "neglectful" of her professional obligations.

She had worked as a cleaner, while she was in Austria, but decided to return to social work, after the driving licence was returned and she came back to the UK.

Her conviction had come about after she went for a night out with friends in Clitheroe, drinking red wine, before being asked to sleep on a sofa at a house nearby.

She had felt uncomfortable, she said, and after rising the next morning decided to go home. But she accepted she was driving too fast when she tried to negotiate a roundabout and caused a crash.

Initially Bradford had offered to keep the post open for her, pending the outcome of the hearing, but this offer had now been withdrawn, the panel heard.

Confirming a caution for Parr, a HCPC spokesman said: "The Panel concluded from the registrant's evidence that she has learned a salutary lesson from the criminal case and the HCPC process.

"She described herself as 'humbled' by events, but also said she believed it had been self-developmental for her."