Parking attendants have been told they should issue 170,000 tickets a year in Brighton and Hove.

The city council denies individual wardens have targets and says parking enforcement is designed to keep traffic flowing.

But the authority has admitted it has given its contractor NCP the "guidance figure" for this year.

The figure has risen by 10,000 since last year, when parking attendants issued are thought to have issued around 168,000 penalty charge notices - raising an estimated £6 million.

A council spokeswoman said: "We do set guidance figures and for this year it was 170,000. The figure is based on what has happened before and the number of parking schemes there are in existence.

"That figure is reviewed every year and could go up or down.

"Parking attendants issue tickets strictly according to whether regulations have been breached. There are no bonus incentives for the number of tickets issued.

"The guidance figure is just that - it gives the operator an indication of the scale of the job."

Environment chairwoman Gill Mitchell said the figure was based on the number of tickets issued in the past.

She said: "It gives NCP an idea of the workload and allows them to deploy their workforce effectively."

Motoring organisation The RAC Foundation said "guidance figure" was a euphemism for targeting.

A spokeswoman said: "No one should park illegally but the whole thrust should be getting traffic moving, not earning money."

Councillor Ted Kemble, Tory environment spokesman, said: "I am shocked by this. At all times when I have asked officials and the environment chair they have said parking attendants do not have a quota. If the figure is 170,000 tickets and you do the sums that is about 470 a day, 365 days a year, which is quite a significant number."

The council has been criticised for the high proportion of ticket appeals which go unchallenged by officers - giving rise to claims many tickets are issued unfairly.

From April 2002 to 2003, 140 appeals went to adjudication. The council did not contest 61 of those while the National Parking Adjudication Service allowed a further 30.

Steve Percy, of Brighton-based People's Parking Protest, said: "The council should not be setting these targets. They have to set some kind of rate to cover running costs but not targets."

Environment deputy chairman Coun Craig Turton said: "In a city of 250,000 people where three quarters of the population have a car, this is the sort of number of tickets we are looking to give. It is a guidance figure not a target and there is a big difference between the two.

"Any money generated from the tickets is ring-fenced and has to go back to be spent on transport and traffic-calming measures.

"There is no financial incentive for wardens to ticket as many people as possible. We are interested in enforcing the quality of tickets given, not the number issued."

An NCP spokesman said the company would be fined if it issued too many tickets but would not disclose what the threshold was.

Birmingham, with four times Brighton's population, issued 164,985 tickets between April 2002 to 2003 and 630 appeals were made.