July 2021 Ripon paedophile planned to sexually abuse girl aged four A convicted paedophile who planned to sexually abuse a four-year-old girl with the help of her mother has been jailed for 10 years. Former St John’s Ambulance volunteer John Peter Noble, 36, gave detailed instructions on how to bring the child to him, including descriptions of how the mother should train the child and what he wanted to do with the youngster, said Kate Bissett, prosecuting. They included the use of a sex toy. On May 1, he bought three pouches of food for the girl’s baby sister at Boots in Ripon and some lubrication oil and set off for the meeting place on the other side of the town’s Market Place. But the “mother” he was messaging and speaking to on the phone was a police officer, the “children” didn’t exist, and her colleagues arrested Noble. The 36-year-old was on a suspended prison sentence passed in 2019 for similar but less serious offences. He had committed them when he had talked to a paedophile hunter believing him to be a 12-year-old child, but had not arranged a meeting. “I do regard you as posing a significant risk of causing serious harm to children by future such offences,” the Recorder of York, Judge Sean Morris, told him. He gave Noble a 14-year extended sentence of 10 years in jail plus four years’ extended licence. He made him subject to a new, lifelong sexual harm prevention order and put him on the sex offenders’ register for life. Noble, who called himself “TryingToMoveForward” online, of North Street, Ripon, pleaded guilty to eight offences of arranging sexual offences with a child through an adult, one of breaching a sexual harm prevention order imposed in 2019 to protect children from him, and breaching the suspended prison sentence. For him, Abbi Whelan said: “He very much wants to change”. While on remand, he had tried to access sex offender courses in prison