SWINDON'S largest supermarket is to shame parking cheats into giving disabled people and mums with babies their rightful place in the car park.

Tesco in Ocotal Way has reported a growing trend in place-hogging by customers who take up spaces reserved for disabled badge holders and struggling parents.

Store bosses plan to blitz selfish parkers with warning tickets when they catch them in reserved spaces, and may even ban persistent offenders from the store.

And the store, the biggest Tesco supermarket in the South West, will soon have its special spaces repainted in violent lilac and orange to make sure the cheats cannot argue they mistook it for an ordinary space.

At the vanguard of the fight at the Ocotal Way store are customer services manager John Turner and store parking warden Gurmail Singh.

By lunchtime yesterday, they had warned 14 people to move out of spaces reserved for parents and the disabled.

In one case, Mr Turner chased a car with three men in it from a parent and baby space. In another he told a shopper to move a builder's van from a space reserved for the disabled.

"We have people who blatantly flout the rules and just don't address who the reserved spaces are actually for," said Mr Turner.

"It's a great frustration because a large percentage of our customers are disabled and a lot of them come into complain about this."

Mr Singh, who is a Sikh, also reported he had been racially abused by some of the customers he confronted, one even calling him a terrorist.

"We have a lot of racist remarks," said Mr Turner.

"I think those are particularly uncalled for, especially at this time."

The crackdown on car cheats will also be introduced at Tesco stores in Cirencester, Devizes and Abingdon.

Tesco spokesman Wayne Padian said the parking problem was the issue most customers complained about, as well as the one that drove them to shop elsewhere.

"The guilty people are all fit and well, but out to save themselves a walk of 20 yards, they cause a lot of grief to customers who need these spaces," he said.

"Other customers hate seeing old people or pregnant mums with children having to struggle across the car park while a fit shopper leaves their car in a special space.

"We need to shame them into stopping because too often asking them results in very serious unpleasantness."