Parking discs in Gourock could be scrapped under a proposal put forward by a town councillor

Chris McEleny wants the system binned and will make a formal request at a meeting of the council's environment and regeneration committee next week.

The SNP councillor believes Gourock - and other parts of the district - should be on a par with Kilmacolm, where the disc scheme ended in January.

Last month, Mr McEleny hit out at the system - calling it a 'postcode lottery' after data revealed that drivers in his constituency are 10 times more likely to receive a parking ticket than Kilmacolm motorists.

According to the latest council figures, 1,861 penalty charge notices (PCNs) were handed out in Gourock in the first six months of this year - up by almost a third on the same period in 2017 - whereas the number of fines issued in Kilmacolm - 198 - was down 35 per cent.

Between January and June, more than 700 PCNs in Gourock were for parking disc-related offences and accounted for 38 per cent of the overall number of tickets.

There were just five such offences in Kilmacolm during the same period - compared with 164 in 2017.

Cllr McEleny said: "When concerns were raised about the disproportionate impact on people that live and work in Gourock, and people that visit Gourock, we were told it would be best to wait for a further report to come back on the matter.

"That report now shows that when the current situation was referred to as a postcode lottery, that's absolutely the fact of the matter. "People in Gourock, in the main, are responsible when it comes to parking.

"What we have is people just trying to go about their daily business whether that's working in the area, living there or visiting local shops. "Removing the need to display a disc wouldn't change rules regarding how long you can park but it would just make the system fairer. "It's not fair the people visiting the area or just people who have a lot on their mind on any given day of the week get fined £60 for forgetting to display a disc. "That's why I'll be moving that the requirement to display a disc in Gourock is removed. "This will put us in exactly the same situation as that already working well in Port Glasgow and Kilmacolm."

Across Greenock, Port Glasgow, Gourock, Kilmacolm and Inverkip, over 4,400 fines were issued in the first six months of 2018 alone - up by 13 per cent year-on-year.