The mother and sister of championship-winning snooker player Matthew Selt are set to be reported to the Department for Work and Pensions after a judge found they orchestrated a £200,000 benefits fraud over 19 years. Central London County Court was told Susan Hickenbotham and her daughter Claire Noble ran a false housing arrangement tied to a £500,000 home in Romford, Essex.

Judge Simon Monty dismissed Hickenbotham’s claim that she had been coerced into signing away ownership of the property in 2019 and ruled the deed valid. He said she had been bullied into signing it, but rejected the claim and awarded her a 10 per cent share of the home’s value instead.

The case centred on a bitter family dispute that had already drawn in Selt, the 2019 Indian Open Champion and world number 43, along with his sisters Claire and Charlotte Hamblin. Hickenbotham alleged her children had pressured her into signing a deed that transferred all interest in the house to Claire. The judge, however, found the wider financial arrangement to be a sham that had been in place long before the ownership fight reached court.

Monty said the housing benefit claims, made between 2000 and 2019 and directed to Claire as the supposed landlady, were fraudulent. He found that the arrangement was not a genuine tenancy but one created and maintained to present Susan as a tenant, when she occupied the property as of right. The court concluded that Susan was not entitled to housing benefit, and that she and Claire both knew it.

The judge said Susan, with Claire’s help, had perpetrated what appeared to be a housing benefits fraud by setting up a false tenancy agreement and naming the true owner of the house as the tenant in order to receive payments used to meet the mortgage. He said Charlotte had not been involved, and added: “Matthew was not involved.”

Monty also said he intended to report Susan and Claire to the appropriate authorities in relation to the apparent fraud. He ended the ruling with a blunt assessment of the dispute, calling it “a very sorry – and I have to say, entirely predictable – end to these unhappy proceedings.”

The judgment leaves the family feud with one clear result: the ownership dispute is over, but the fallout is not. Susan Hickenbotham’s claim of coercion has failed, the deed stands, and the benefits findings are now headed beyond the family courtroom and into the hands of investigators.