By This article was first published on LabourList on September 10th, 2009.
I live close to my local hospital in Telford. It is situated 5 miles away from the town centre and is primarily surrounded by fields and private housing. To park your car in the car park you have to pay at least £2 per visit and it even charges staff for the privilege of using the staff car park. Why? To prevent shoppers parking for free? I don't think so.
According to a poll carried out by Macmillan Cancer Support more than half of cancer patients do not get free or discounted parking on hospital visits, contrary to government guidelines. The founding principle of the NHS was that it would offer free-at-the-point-of-delivery healthcare. Surely this should apply whether you go to hospital as a patient, as a visitor or a member of staff. It's simply not fair to expect patients or visitors to have to pay when they come to hospital, when they may be suffering personal anxiety, stress or grief.
For this reason I welcomed last year's announcement by the Scottish government (following on from a similar announcement by the Welsh Assembly earlier in the same year) to scrap car parking charges at the vast majority of its hospitals - 3 hospitals will be exempt because of PFI agreements and please don't get me started on that one! It is hugely disappointing that the Department of Health does not believe it would be a "sensible use of limited resources" to subsidise car parking at hospitals in England. Really?
The NHS ended this financial year with a £1.75 billion surplus, surely it would not be unreasonable to use a small amount of this total surplus to offset the £95 million that NHS Trusts took from car parking charges in 2006-2007. Government guidelines on car parking charges "strongly recommended" that NHS bodies introduce some kind of "season ticket" arrangement and allow free or reduced-price parking for patients with a long-term illness or those with serious conditions who require daily or regular treatment, and their prime visitors. The government has also suggested a weekly cap on parking charges at hospitals.
One option that needs urgently to be looked at is the provision of free hospital parking and help with travel costs for all cancer patients. The other option is to scrap the charges in England completely.
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I know because I was a budget holder and budget codes were created to 'hide' money from the finance department.
1) Buy the car parks off the PFI companies who own them or
2) agree to pay the PFI company charges
neither of these are an acceptable use of money that should be used for treatment. The Tory policy of PFI should never have been used in the first place. It was a mistake. It would be better to admit that now, and to advocate a policy of wiping out all PFI projects (since most PFI contracts are millions of lines, I am sure thare is a cluse in there somewhere to allow the government to take over immediate public ownership - a "RailTrack/Network Rail" clause).
It is not in the "gift" of the DoH to end car parking charges. Many of the car parks are PFI owned, so the DoH will have to buy them off the PFI companies or pay parking fees to the PFI companies either of which will be money from the DoH budget going to PFI shareholders rather than healthcare.
As others have said, this is popularist nonsense and is unworkable. A much better suggestion - especially in these times of the PFI companies being close to collapse, and with the Treasury accepting the international accounting standards (ie PFI debt being treated as national debt and hence no need any more for the PFI smoke and mirrors) - would be to scrap PFI entirely and get back to honest government borrowing.
I am a pharmacist and worked in the NHS for some 14 years. In the late 80s the hospital where I was working introduced parking fees for both staff and visitors.
Parking permits are available to certain categories of patients in hospitals entitling them to free parking whilst undergoing treatment. When I visit the Royal Free's Haemophilia Unit (as a patient) I obtain a permit and park outside the unit.
I think hospital staff and patients should be charged for the luxury of parking on hospital property but I would prefer a one off fee. It's annoying arriving for an out patient's appointment and worrying about having to top-up
your meter. I broke my ankle in August and last week had a consultant's appointment but I also had to visit the plaster room to have my plaster removed and again to have an air cast fitted and then was sent to visit the physio dept to make an appointment. I did travel alone by taxi but had I been able to drive or with a friend driving then our car parking ticket would have been on my mind and I would not have been able to concentrate.
Hospital parking spaces by those who do not have a legitimate hospital based reason for parking there.
I heard Northampton General mentioned below, this is a case in point, parking charges were introduced in an effort to reduce the amount of people who parked there in order to visit the town centre (a 2 min walk from the hospital) and avoid the pay and display option.
This however penalised me, when my wife was about to give birth, and I have to rummage through my pockets looking for change for the parking meter
Maybe a system which refuses access to those without a legitiamte reason for being there is the way forward. How that would be implemented, I dont know
There is no 'surplus'. This is mainly funds for projects that run across year end eg orders for goods that are late, delayed construction and IT projects. It isn't free cash and even if it was shouldn't it be spent on service? And haven't you realised that it is your Government's policy to tax you out of your car so they want these charges to be as high as possible.
.
Don't be silly, people have to fight for it, it needs to be hard-won and then The Beloved Leader can make a huge show of abolishing those evil tory charges on behalf of his adoring people in the name of progress and fairness. Just having someone get their finger out and do the blindingly obvious after 12 chuffing years is too much to ask.
The morons who invoke hospital parking charges are either callous or stupid. If they realise the above scenario happens on a regular basis they are callous. If they do not realise it happens they are stupid. This means any pen-pusher in an NHS Trust that signs up to hospital parking charges is a callous and/or stupid bastard who should not be allowed to work within a million miles of the health sector.
Have fun at conference.
But you don't want to rock up to conference with this do you Alex? However, worthy it is.
Just what I was about to say.
I agree with the policy but really? Top 5?
In order function a hospital needs facilities like a roof and a car park. Charging the individual punter directly for use of either is stupid.
Having said that - if this gets into Alex's Top 5 policies to take to conference, then Labour really is lacking in vision.