A PARISH councillor who sexually assaulted four men and attacked a pensioner in his Essex home has been spared jail.

Kieran Reed, a former member of Hale Bank Parish Council, was handed a 12-month imprisonment suspended for two years at Warrington Magistrates Court today, Tuesday, after being convicted of four counts of sexual assault and inflicting grievous bodily harm.

The 38-year-old carried out a series of drunken attacks between August 2020 and July this year.

Reed, of Church Street in Widnes, was found guilty of three sexual assaults carried out in the town last summer following a trial at Crewe Magistrates Court before district judge Nicholas Sanders.

Having subjected an 85-year-old man to a serious assault in Chelmsford in April 2021, he then sexually assaulted another man in Widnes on Wednesday, July 7.

The defendant pleaded guilty to both of these offences.

Reed was also ordered to serve a rehabilitation activity requirement of up to 50 days, handed a six-month electronically-monitored curfew from 7pm to 7am and told to pay compensation totalling £1,200 to his victims.

Crown prosecutor Jonathan Wilkinson, of the Crown Prosecution Service Mersey Cheshire, said: “It is clear that Kieran Reed is struggling at the moment and has issues with alcohol.

“But his actions on these several occasions were totally unacceptable.

“He left his victims feeling vulnerable, shaken and violated.

“The Crown Prosecution Service would like to thank them for their help in bringing this prosecution.”

A two-day trial back in April heard that Reed touched the thigh of an on-duty police officer after telling him he was ‘gorgeous and had a lovely leg’.

Later the same month, he asked a fellow customer at the Bradley pub to come home with him and grabbed his buttocks when the man refused.

In a third incident, the disgraced councillor touched a taxi driver’s muscles and attempted to touch his penis while being driven as a passenger in the back of his cab.

District judge Sanders said upon the conviction: “Each of the offences on their own perhaps might be easier to brush off as minor offences of touching.

“But what the evidence would suggest is that when significantly drunk, which Mr Reed was, he becomes predatory and that is something which clearly needs to be addressed.”