Free parking must continue for NHS staff

DURING the coronavirus crisis, NHS staff have been able to park at hospitals across the region without having to pay. The charges were dropped so nurses, cleaners and other hospital staff could get to work without extra charges or hassle.

But now the Government is set to end the free parking, arguing the coronavirus crisis is easing.

Liberal Democrat group leader Councillor Mike Ross said: “Our NHS staff and social care workers in the city have been putting themselves on the front line every single day to protect us.

“It is absolutely right that they shouldn’t be punished for parking at work, especially when the Government itself is discouraging the use of public transport.

“Even if this Covid-19 crisis was close to being over, scrapping free parking for NHS staff shows that the Government has learned nothing.

“We have been clapping for carers over the past few months, but we must match that with real action to improve things for NHS and care workers.

“That’s why extortionate parking charges for NHS staff should be axed, and why health and social care workers deserve a decent pay rise. Sadly, it doesn’t look like the Government will give them either.”

Liberal Democrat leadership candidate Layla Moran added: “Removing parking charges for staff at the outset of Covid-19 was the right move. Our healthcare workers deserved to have certainty that they could get to work without extra charges or hassle.

“Now the Government must provide clarity and ensure our workers are not saddled with extortionate parking charges.

“We also need to see more efforts to promote green transport options for our healthcare workers.”

Liberal Democrats group, Hull City Council.

IT grows clearer each day, that the actions and words of both President

Donald Trump and Prime Minister Boris Johnson are following alarmingly similar routes.

They amount to deepening, not healing, the growing divisions here and in the US.

They also might best be called misrule, for effective leaders of modern democracies have to unite, building consensus and consent as they go.

Trump is close to despicable in his pandering to a largely angry, white, male base, at the expense of huge swathes of American society.

Despite his fine words on “levelling up”, the actions of Johnson (nobody close to him calls him Boris), have produced the same widening chasms.

Both may see themselves as winners, but when they so damage the fabric of their nations, they are like the rest of us, losers.

Beverley.