Ordeal of NHS staff in £13m battle to park outside work
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DOZENS of doctors, nurses and support workers have been left suffering stress and sickness after an NHS trust authorised a private car park operator to pursue them through the courts over unpaid fines.
Medical and administrative staff at University Hospital of Wales (UHW) in Cardiff face bills totalling £12.8million after a court ruled they were liable to pay £128 for each ticket they received, plus tens of thousands in court fees. They are preparing to appeal against the ruling.
Many employees have racked up three or four tickets a week and fear they will have to sell their homes or go bankrupt in order to pay the charges.
One nurse said that despite being heavily pregnant she feels she has to cycle to work as she is too scared to park on site because of the “ludicrously high fines”.
She told The Sunday Telegraph: “This unfair action has caused me to call into question why I even became a nurse as the people who employ me have clearly walked away and don’t care.”
The parking crisis at UHW came after the Cardiff and Vale University Health Board (UHB) last year authorised Indigo, its car park operator, to pursue cases against its own staff.
Hospital car parking fees were abolished in Scotland and Wales in 2008 unless external contracts were already in place. Indigo’s contract does not expire until March next year.
In a letter seen by the Telegraph, UHB said it “acknowledged and agreed” that Indigo was “entitled to pursue all outstanding parking charges, including, without limitation, through pursuing court action against infringers”.
A judge in a three-day at Cardiff Civil Justice Centre ruled against three people who had more than 100 offences between them. The verdict was considered binding on a further 72 colleagues.
UHW has 1,800 parking spaces but as many as 8,000 staff are issued with parking permits, allowing them to park in designated zones for £1.05 a day. Those spaces are often full by 6.40am, leaving employees, many whom are dashing to work to deal with serious cases, to park where they can.
One medical worker received a ticket after rushing into work at 3am to deal with a heart attack.
He said: “I drive 11 miles, park, run up to the theatre, save the patient’s life, stabilise the patient, return to the car at 6am to find a parking ticket … we do what’s best for our patients and get punished and ridiculed for doing so.”
For years, staff had ignored the tickets, believing they were not binding. But in 2015, UHB told staff to pay any fines, saying they had been correctly issued and it did not intend to dispute them. Last April, Indigo said it would cancel all parking charge notices up to the end of March 2016 as a “gesture of goodwill” and reduced the charge to £10 if paid within 14 days. But the problem did not go away and more than 100,000 tickets are said to have been issued since then, amounting to bills of almost £13 million.
Staff say public transport to the hospital is not good enough, with a parkand-ride scheme, launched this May, finishing before most doctors and nurses have ended their shifts.
UHB said proper parking enforcement was vital to keep traffic flowing and enable all emergency vehicles safe access to the site. Len Richards, chief executive of the health board, wrote to staff this week saying the trust recognised it was “deeply distressing” for those liable for costs.
He said: “As a Health Board we take no comfort from our staff being involved in this legal process and we are consistently working to try and find alternative and sustainable modes of transport to the site. Our plea remains for staff to comply and help us try to find the solutions together.”