A PERVERT who filmed a family getting changed at a leisure centre has been banned from swimming pools for three years.

Nathan Hull, 28, of Harwich Road, Colchester, admitted filming a woman at Colchester Leisure World.

Initially, the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to take action following a police investigation.

However, the police appealed against the decision and prosecutors changed their minds.

Hull admitted voyeurism last month and was sentenced at Colchester Magistrates’ Court.

District judge David Cooper told Hull: “This was an outrageous violation of this family’s privacy. It was disgusting in every way.

“In many ways, you deserve to go straight to prison, but the guidelines I have suggest I must consider a community order and I’m obliged to follow them.

“It should be clearly understood any breach and you will go to prison.”

Hull must attend regular appointments with a probation officer for three years and attend a sex offender course.

He was banned from any public baths for three years and ordered to pay £500 compensation to the family and court costs.

The victim spotted Hull filming her family under the changing room door with his phone in September last year.

She was in the cubicle with her partner and their two sons, six and two. Her partner blocked the door and Hull was arrested.

The woman who was filmed said after the sentencing she still could not sleep properly, was on medication and had been advised to see a counsellor.

She had to watch the video to confirm it was her being filmed, only to be told later the case was going to be dropped.

A day after her story appeared in the Gazette, the Crown Prosecution Service reviewed the case.

A senior lawyer decided Nathan Hull, who was convicted for indecent exposure in October 2005 after an incident outside a shop in Bromley Road, Colchester, should be charged.

The woman had hoped Hull would be jailed and said he should have been banned from leisure centres for life.

She said: “I feel I have got justice and I am so glad I did what I did, but it should not have been down to me to get him prosecuted.

“People cannot know what he has put my family through."