DRIVERS in Worcester have forked out nearly £500,000 in council parking fines over the last year - with 16,000 people slapped with penalty tickets.

Your Worcester News today lifts the lid on the worst places to get stung in the city - with the Cornmarket car park topping the pile.

This newspaper has examined three years worth of data on parking notices in the city, which reveals:

- In the 12-month period to the end of March, the entire 2014/15 financial year, £490,080 went into council coffers after 16,885 fines were handed out

- Nearly one in five of those 16,885 parking tickets, 3,070 of the total, were cancelled after thousands of drivers successfully appealed

- Over the three-year period a whopping £1.53 million has been raised from the fines, which are either £50 or £70 depending on where the vehicle is caught

- Overall a staggering 52,251 parking fines have been slapped on vehicles by the city council, but 11,282 of those were cancelled

- The car park where drivers are most likely to get stung is the Cornmarket, where more than 5,300 people have been fined since 2012, followed by Copenhagen Street and the Cattle Market

The fines includes actual council car parks and off-street parking where vehicles are left in bays without putting cash into the meter.

What the data also reveals is that the fines and number of people being caught has fallen slightly across Worcester in recent years.

In 2012 19,361 tickets were slapped on vehicles, but that tally then fell to just over 17,000 before another small drop to 16,885.

One reason for that is thought to be car park prices being cut, making the charges appear more reasonable, as well as the improving economy.

Local government minister Eric Pickles insisted back in April that councils must offer drivers 'grace' periods of up to 10 minutes for returning to their vehicles at car parks, but the city council has offered drivers grace periods for several years anyway.

Every year around 3,000 to 4,000 drivers get off after an appeal, and in 2013/14 as many as 847 escaped the bill because the council says the debts proved "uncollectable" and were later written off.

Sixty per cent of the cash goes to the county council which puts the money back into the roads and the rest is kept by the city council, which it says goes on funding parking enforcement and maintaining its car parks.

The RAC Foundation says councils should be mindful that fines should only be there to manage congestion.

Director Steve Gooding said: "Local authorities' role is to manage traffic and provide accessibility - not to generate excessive surpluses."

But Councillor Simon Geraghty, city council leader, said: "If fines are falling and more people are parking responsibly that's good news.

"We haven't adopted aggressive methods of handing out parking tickets."