A former scout leader and Christian preacher has been jailed for luring boys as young as four into his home with sweets and money and filmed them performing sex acts.

James Bailey, 69, of Brigstock Road, Thornton Heath, exploited his positions of trust to subject three vulnerable victims under the age of 10 to repeated assaults over the course of a decade.

He persuaded his youngest victim, aged just four when the abuse began in the early 1990s, into depraved acts.

The boy's elder brother, aged six at the time of the earliest offences, was filmed masturbating by Bailey, who assured him that “no one else” would watch the footage.

Bailey, a scout leader for seven years and a regular lay preacher at South Croydon churches, was jailed four eight years on Wednesday after being convicted of seven counts of indecent assault of a male under 14 and eight counts of indecency with a child under 16.

During a two-week trial, Croydon Crown Court heard that Bailey earned the trust of the brothers’ family before subjecting the boys to a catalogue of abuses behind their parents’ backs.

Bailey, who the family knew as 'Jim', took advantage of this trust to spend time alone with the eldest boy in a bedsit he rented in Spa Hill.

He curried the boy's favour by allowing him to watch action films, including The Terminator and Alien, that his parents had banned, then incited him to perform sex acts.

He later begun abusing the boy’s four-year-old brother, who said Bailey put his hand down his trousers and groped him, bribing him into silence with bowls of ice cream and a Fab ice lolly.

Much of the abuse took place at Bailey’s Spa Hill lodgings with both boys present.

He also molested the younger brother at South Norwood Leisure Centre in Portland Roa, as well as a cub scout, unknown to the brothers, between 1997 and 2000 when he was a scout leader.