Council goes to town with fine for Fergie
Last updated 13:35, Thursday, 17 July 2008
BUYING a vintage Massey Ferguson tractor as a restoration project was just the ticket for North Tyne pub landlord Hughie Milburn.
But the half-century-old workhorse provided one surprise Hughie hadn’t bargained for.
For months after he had installed the Fergie in his shed at the Percy Arms pub in Birtley, he received a parking ticket for it – from Leeds City Council!
Hughie said: “The tractor was registered in 1960, and has a burst radiator. It wouldn’t make it to the end of the village, let alone Leeds!
“It has never moved from the shed, yet the city council in Leeds insists I was parked in the centre of the city in the middle of April.
“The £50 ticket is made out to a red Massey Ferguson tractor, but it certainly wasn’t mine!”
Hughie bought the vehicle from a relative in Carrshield, who had in turn bought it from Fewsters in Hexham in 1970.
He said: “She too had had parking tickets from Leeds for the tractor, and got in touch with the authorities to explain there had clearly been a mistake.
“They claimed it had been sorted out, but it obviously hasn’t been.
“I suspect someone has cloned the number plate, but I thought the police were able to use number plate recognition technology to sort out problems like this.”
And this week, a spokesman for Leeds City Council, his face redder than the tractor, admitted there had been a cock-up.
He said: “We certainly don’t get many vintage tractors parked in the middle of a cosmopolitan city like Leeds!
“We have checked our records, and discovered that the ticket was actually issued in respect of a grey Hyundai saloon with the same number plate as the tractor.
“It may have been a foreign registered vehicle, which sometimes have the same numbers as those issued in this country.
“As Mr Milburn says, the other possibility is that the number plate has been cloned.”
He said if Mr Milburn contacted the council, the ticket would be quashed.
