Transport chiefs have admitted every ticket handed out in the first five years of a new parking scheme was invalid.

The blunder means Brighton and Hove City Council pocketed 700,000 fines it was not entitled to - each one worth between £30 and £90.

Yet the authority will not have to pay back a penny to drivers and will lose a maximum of just £27,000 by dropping 300 cases not yet settled.

The issue came to light after a businessman threatened to take the council to court because he believed he had been wrongly charged for tickets totalling £11,500.

Mike Gurney, who runs emergency plumbers Glowzone, argued the wording on the parking tickets and the charge certificates failed to meet the requirements of the Road Traffic Act.

Following a High Court ruling at the beginning of August, the authority backed down and said he no longer had to pay for tickets issued before July 6 2005.

In a letter received on Friday, Mr Gurney was told he did not have to pay 44 of his parking tickets, worth nearly £6,000.

It said that following a similar court case against the London Borough of Barnet it would be "unsafe to continue to try to recover charges" on these fines.

Mr Gurney said the council admitted to his solicitor that on July 6 2005 it changed the way parking tickets were issued.

He said: "It is the first time the council have admitted that the tickets are invalid.

"The council should now write off any ticket issued since decriminalisation in 2001.

"Now that it has been proved to be invalid you would expect them to pay it back, or it is not fair that they are not taking the money from me.

"The other people who have unpaid fines also need to be told they don't have to pay. They can't not collect it from me but collect it from everybody else."

During the Barnet case, it was ruled the council's parking tickets were invalid because, like the tickets issued in Brighton and Hove before July 2005, they did not state both the date of the parking contravention and the issue date.

It was also decided that while unpaid fines should no longer be charged, the council did not have to backdate and refund all the fines already paid over the previous five years.

A Brighton and Hove City Council spokesman said: "The adjudication also ruled that no refunds would be payable retrospectively. We were one of the first councils in the country to put both dates on, so this ruling is not going to affect us much.

"We think the ruling is likely to affect around 300 unpaid penalty charge notices in total.

"This is in the context of issuing around 150,000 notices per year and a total of around 700,000 since the council took control of parking enforcement in 2001.

"It does mean we are not going to pursue the small number of penalty charge notices we issued to Glowzone vehicles prior to July 2005 that have still not been paid.

"However, we are still pursuing Glowzone for the large number of tickets we have issued their vehicles with since July 2005. If they continue to refuse to pay we will take whatever action is necessary to make them do so."

Glowzone has a fleet of eight vans in which employees travel to fix gas and water leaks.

While they are dealing with emergencies they are often issued with parking tickets, amounting to hundreds a year.