Traffic warden caught parking on pavement...

A traffic warden has been caught parking on double yellow lines while giving a ticket to another car.

The warden's blue Audi was left not only on double yellow lines in Left Bank, central Manchester, but was also parked partly on the pavement. The officer then started photographing other cars parked illegally nearby.

According to the Sun, he'll escape a fine - as the rules allow wardens to park on double yellows in the curse of their work if needs be.

In fact, parking on double yellow lines seems to be something of a habit for traffic wardens in the Manchester area.

In February, an enforcement officer in Stockport did exactly the same thing after spotting a car parked illegally in a disabled bay.

Stockport Council said afterwards that the warden should have found a legal parking spot 'if possible', but that wardens parking illegally wasn't actually against the rules as long as the warden was carrying out official duties.

And last year Manchester Council staff found an even more outrageous way to give a ticket: by physically moving a legally parked car onto double yellow lines.

Road workers were painting double yellow lines in West Didsbury and shifted Clair Morris's car to get at the road beneath. Unfortunately, they moved it onto another set of double yellow lines, where it was promptly ticketed. The council later apologised.

And, to be fair, Manchester seems to have more than its fair share of selfish motorists. A Facebook page called Bad Parking Greater Manchester shows, for example, a taxi parking on the pavement outside a school and a Ferrari taking up not one but two disabled parking bays.

Late last year, car buying experts Zuto used freedom of information requests to discover that Edinburgh Council had issued the most tickets over the previous year, followed by the London Borough of Ealing, Birmingham, Glasgow and Enfield.

And, according to the RAC, local councils made £693 million during the year from fines.

"The financial sums involved in local authority parking are huge and the overall profits eye-watering," said Steve Gooding, director of the RAC Foundation.