Couple in parking stand-off after council painted yellow lines outside house

A Norwich couple are refusing to move their £9,000 Porsche Cayenne in a stand-off with the council over double yellow lines outside their home.

Beautician Jill Stanforth, 33, and her partner, Gareth Desouky, 41, arrived home on September 14 to find the lines painted either side of their car - and a £35 parking ticket on the windscreen.

"We've never had any official warning from the council. They've not sent us a letter, they've not put anything through our letter box to give us any alternative parking," Jill tells the Eastern Daily Press.

"We don't mean to be awkward, we just want help in finding our permitted place to park. If we knew this was the situation we'd never have moved there in the first place."

Since then, the couple have refused to move the car, saying other residents haven't been penalised in the same way. They have racked up £280 in parking tickets, which they plan to appeal.

Norwich City Council says that everybody was warned about the change, which comes as part of a multi-million-pound overhaul of the city's streets. It says 'fair warning of the changes was given'.

It's not the first time that Norwich City Council has come under fire for its over-enthusiastic use of double yellow lines: in 2011, it painted some just 41cm long, although nobody was actually given a ticket for parking there.

Earlier this year, though, Lambeth Council painted a disabled bay around a parked car, and then slapped it with a £110 ticket. The council later apologised and cancelled the fine.

And last year, a team painting double yellow lines in Manchester found a car in the way, and decided to pick it up and move it. Unfortunately, they shifted it to the other side of the street where double yellow lines are already in place - and the car was promptly ticketed.

It's worth remembering that if you are ticketed unreasonably, you do have a fair chance of challenging the fine. A quarter of all appeals are successful, freedom of information requests have revealed: there's advice on how to go about it here.