AN angry law lecturer used his own appearance in the dock to criticise a £70 fine for forgetting to display a parking disc.

Robin Crowther, 66, of Coniscliffe Road, Darlington, pleaded guilty to failing to have a disc on show when his car was parked in the Applegarth car park, Northallerton, North Yorkshire, on January 26.

The car park is free, but one half has a two-hour waiting limit.

Mr Crowther, a retired media law lecturer who taught at Darlington College for 26 years, did not pay the initial £45 fine, and when it rose to £70 after 14 days, decided to have his case heard in court.

Yesterday, he appeared before magistrates in Northallerton, where he launched a scathing attack on Hambleton District Council.

"I didn't pay £45 because I thought it was a lot of money to pay for forgetting to put a disc on my car," he told the court.

"I think it was quite out of proportion to the offence."

He said he was shocked by the volume of mail he had been sent by the authority.

"I regard myself as a young pensioner, but if you were an elderly pensioner and you got this avalanche of legal gobbledegook through the post, you wouldn't think you had forgotten to display a parking disk, you would have thought it was for a more serious offence."

Magistrates fined him £70 and ordered him to pay £80 costs.

Court chairman Robert Walker said: "We have thought long and hard about this, but no matter how we look at it we can't find any way out of the situation - no matter how much sympathy we have for the case you present.

"In all honesty, we cannot differentiate between this and other cases without a tremendous precedent being set, and we can't justify that precedent."

Speaking after the hearing, Mr Crowther said: "It seems to me that it is a money-making scam by Hambleton District Council."

But the authority's head of legal services, Martyn Richards said: "Despite what people out there think, we are not exactly making vast amounts of money out of car parking.

"It is all about enforcing the car park to try to keep a good turnover of motorists so that everybody gets to use the car park.

"Our fines are not excessive compared with other councils."