A couple face losing their home after a Customs swoop netted more than 170,000 bootleg cigarettes.

Electrical engineer Peter Booth was yesterday jailed for 12 months after he admitted storing and dealing goods for which duty had not been paid. He was also ordered to pay £900 costs within a year.

And the city's Crown Court heard that a confiscation hearing to recover the unpaid amount, probably in three months' time, could cost him and his wife their house.

Julie Booth, 42, had also been charged in connection with the cigarette scam, but Recorder Geoffrey Marson QC was told that no evidence was being offered against her.

He formally ordered not guilty verdicts to be recorded in her case and she was allowed to leave the dock.

The court heard that Customs officers searched the couple's home in Trinity View, Low Moor, in June last year and found cartons of bootleg cigarettes stacked in the hallway and garage.

Prosecutor Nick Worsley said 171,180 cigarettes were found, as well as notes and lists containing names, numbers and amounts.

Calculations based on the figures suggested the total excise duty evaded over a six-month period was about £200,000, but, when Booth entered his guilty pleas, it was on the basis of an agreed figure of £123,500.

When questioned about his activities by Customs officers he said he had been storing the cigarettes for a friend and had been paid £20 or £30 for doing so in the past.

Booth, 33, denied at the time that he had been trading in the goods, but Mr Worsley said that was now accepted by his guilty plea. Barrister Tahir Khan, for Booth, said: "Whilst the amount of duty evaded is sizeable, there is no evidence here of the trappings of wealth. He has a decent job and they live in a modest house. The consequence of this conviction is his misery won't end with him going to prison because there is the real prospect of the house having to be sold to discharge the confiscation order the court is likely to make."

Recorder Marson said the courts had to send out a message to people dealing in cigarettes that custodial sentences would follow.

But he said: "I'm going to take an exceptional course, in my judgement, for this amount of duty. Normally you are a hard-working, decent man and there is every reason to think a short taste of custody is likely to persuade you in particular from offending in the future."