HUNDREDS of drivers caught using bus lanes have escaped fines after a computer virus forced town hall chiefs to cancel their tickets.

The `Conficker worm' caused chaos when it hit Manchester town hall in February. Now we can reveal the bug cost the council more than £43,000 in `lost' bus lane fines.

The computer problems meant 1,609 tickets could not be issued within the 28-day legal limit - rendering them useless.

In total, the Conficker worm cost taxpayers in Manchester nearly £1.5m, the M.E.N has learned.


The costs included:

A £1.2m bill in the IT department, including £600,000 getting ‘consultancy support’ to fix the problems, which including drafting in experts from Microsoft;


£178,000 in extra staffing costs across the town hall – including £169,000 going to clear up a backlog of benefits claims and council tax bills;


Compensation payments due to delays in processing benefit claims.


The Conficker worm has been a worldwide menace, hitting organisations including the French navy and the US air force.

Council staff found they were unable to send emails, open files and print documents, and were ordered to keep back-up paper records in case they lost data.

A town hall report reveals that the virus caused a number host of ‘major concerns’ including potential delays to the school admissions process and ‘risk to vulnerable adults and children through degraded social care activity’.

The council says those risks were successfully managed, with ‘no major individual breaches of service delivery’.


But it highlighted the council’s lack of an IT ‘disaster recovery plan’ – putting it at risk of losing huge amounts of data.


That is now being addressed as a matter of urgency.


Staff have been banned from using memory sticks and all USB ports into town hall computers have been disabled to stop a virus being accidentally brought into the council’s computer system.

Steve Park, Head of ICT at Manchester city council, said: “I’d like to reassure the public that we’ve built on and improved our disaster recovery strategy, which covers all our main networks.


“This means that in the event of an emergency those key systems can be recovered with minimal disruption to the services involved.”