Motorists were left scrabbling for parking spaces today after a fleet of BT vans moved on to Bradford's Vicar Lane car park.

Around a quarter of the car park was cordoned off for 150 engineering vans, and police lined roads into the car park with cones to further restrict parking.

The BT customer service engineers - many of whom who arrived alone in Ford Transit vans - had come from across Yorkshire and Humberside to discuss service reorganisation.

BT spokesman Andrew Dorrington said the engineers worked from home so it would have been impossible to bus them into Bradford.

He said: "The vans are garaged at home so they had to drive to Bradford in their vans. They would be going to other jobs straight from the meeting."

Driver Jenny Morrill, who works at the Employment Service in Vicar Lane, said motorists should have been told in advance.

She said: "It's really annoying, a bit of advance warning would have been nice.

"It's taken me a while to find a space whereas normally I'm straight in."

Julie Hoyle, who works at the nearby Yorkshire Water offices, said: "There's a lot of free parking space where the vans have gone.

"I think I've quite lucky to get a space."

But Rob Martin, who works for Bradford Community Broadcasting, said Bradford Council had put the engineers in the right place.

"There's always space where they park, it's not used by many people."

A Bradford Council spokesman said: "BT has pre-booked approximately 80 spaces on Vicar Lane car park until lunchtime today. This is a public car park and it is not uncommon for companies to pre-book spaces for events.

"We appreciate this may have inconvenienced some motorists but the pre-booked spaces were on the least-used side of the car park, furthest away from the city centre, and there were plenty of other car parking spaces available in the Vicar Lane car park and the city."

Councillor Latif Dar, of the Council's transportation committee, said: "We need to offer such parking facilities to attract businesses to Bradford to hold conferences and for other events which help put the district on the map."

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