Disabled zone painted round car

6.21.54pm UTC (GMT +0000) Tue 24th Jul 2007

A driver who had workmen paint a disabled zone around his car after he parked it has said he thought he was the victim of a television prank. And to make matters worse, John Junk found he had also been issued with a £30 fine for parking illegally. Mr Junk said the space on Castlereagh Street in east Belfast had not been specially designated when he left his vehicle.

Mr Junk said: "I thought it was some sort of Jeremy Beadle-type stunt. I work for the charity Families Need Fathers and had been parked for about an hour while I was seeing one of our members and when I came out I noticed there was a ticket on my windscreen. I thought this was strange because there were not any parking restrictions, but when I looked down I noticed that a disabled bay had been painted partially around the back of my car, but because my car is so long they were unable to paint the front of it."

A local shopkeeper told Mr Junk that workmen had arrived shortly after he had left his car and had started to paint the bay. He said the woman told him traffic wardens arrived afterwards and had put the ticket on his car. "The lady who owns the confectionery shop had remonstrated with the people who had painted it and also with the parking enforcement people who had come to put the ticket there, but, she said, neither would listen to her," he said. "You can see clearly from the pictures that I took that the bay is incomplete."

A Department for Regional Development spokeswoman said on Tuesday it was not "normal practice for Roads Service to paint new parking restrictions around parked vehicles. We will be looking into our procedures and guidelines with our contractors to ensure this does not occur again," she continued. "Following the painting of an incomplete accessible bay for disabled users around a parked vehicle, a penalty charge notice was incorrectly issued to the vehicle. "Roads Service has acknowledged this error and intends to issue an apology to the owner of the vehicle for any inconvenience caused."