Hospital parking charges

10.00.00pm BST (GMT +0100) Tue 11th Aug 2009

Salisbury Hospital makes over £600,000 in parking charges.

Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust made £636,608 last year in parking charges, research by the Liberal Democrats has revealed. The parking charges have been criticised as a tax on the sick and a petition has been launched calling on the local Trust and the Government to review the charging policy.

Figures revealed in a Freedom of Information request show that in 2007-2008 Salisbury Hospital made £603,454 in parking charges and fees from visitors and £33,154 from NHS staff. In total across the UK, hospitals made over £110m from parking charges.

Campaigning in the car park at Salisbury District Hospital in early August, the Liberal Democrats collected signatures on a petition to the local Trust calling for a review of the parking charges policy.

Speaking to local residents, Liberal Democrat Parliamentary Spokesman for Salisbury, Nick Radford, said:

"This is a staggering amount of money for the NHS to be making from car parking charges.

"The whole point of an NHS free at the point of access is that people who fall sick should not have to pay more for the service than people who remain healthy. Charging patients for car parking at hospitals goes against this basic principle - it is effectively a tax on the sick.

"I also think we have to ask why the figure has risen by over £100,000 since 2006? No one is denying the need for hospitals to cover their costs but that doesn't mean they can use charges to help themselves out of financial black holes.

"The Government has ducked this issue for far too long and we now need an urgent review into whether hardworking doctors and nurses and the chronically ill should be paying these charges at all."