What crackdown? Hospital car parks raked in a record £175m last year

HOSPITALS made a record £175 million in parking charges last year – despite a supposed Government crackdown.

They also made nearly £1 million from parking fines – up by a third on the previous year – although the true figure could be £4 million. And more than half are still charging disabled patients to park.

A Freedom of Information request found the highest charges are at the Royal Surrey County Hospital in Guildford, at £4 an hour. Another 14 hospitals charge at least £3 an hour, including Northampton General at £3.20 and Southend University Hospital at £3.10.

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has previously admitted the fees were ‘unfair’. In 2014, he introduced guidelines urging NHS trusts to offer free or reduced parking for cancer patients, the disabled, relatives and staff.

But the rules were not legally binding and many trusts chose to ignore them, because the fees are an important source of income.

Liberal Democrat health spokesman Norman Lamb said: ‘ The vast sums that hospitals make from parking charges reveal the hidden cost of healthcare faced by many patients and their families. Hospital car park charges amount to a tax on sickness, with people who are chronically ill or disabled bearing the brunt.’

Labour health spokesman Jonathan Ashworth added: ‘Hospital parking charges are an entirely unfair and unnecessary burden, which disproportionately affect the most vulnerable people using our health service. Even Jeremy Hunt has described this outrageous practice as a “stealth tax”, and yet Tory underfunding of our NHS has resulted in hospitals and private companies extracting record fees from patients and staff.’

Rachel Power, of the Patients’ Association, said: ‘Parking charges amount to an extra charge for being ill. The increase in the number of trusts who are charging for disabled parking is particularly concerning.

‘Patients who require disabled parking may have little choice but to access their care by car, and may need to do so often. Target- ing them in this way feels rather cynical.’ Figures from 111 of the 150 hospital trusts in England showed they raised £174.5 million from parking charges in 2016/17, an increase of 6 per cent on the £164.1 million collected in 2015/16.

Of these trusts, 56 said they charged disabled patients to park in some or all of their designated disabled spaces. Only 40 trusts provided data on fines and they made £947,568 in 2016/17, up from £716,385 the previous year.

Former Tory MP Robert Halfon, who obtained the figures, branded the parking fees ‘blood money’.

England is the only part of the UK where hospital patients are routinely charged for parking.

The Department of Health said: ‘NHS organisations are locally responsible for the methods used to charge, and we want to see them coming up with flexible options that put patients and their families first.’

‘An extra charge for being ill’