Hospital Car Parking Charges

Debate between Lord Jackson of Peterborough and David Wright

Monday 1st September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)]

I join in the congratulations to my hon. Friends the Members for Thurrock (Jackie Doyle-Price) and for Harlow (Robert Halfon). This is precisely the type of issue for which the Backbench Business Committee was established, so that we can try to alleviate the problems of people who feel their voice is rarely heard when set against a big bureaucracy.

Parking charges are an important issue because there are both philosophical and practical problems with them. Philosophically, it was never the intention that patients should be forced into a back-door stealth tax by virtue of the fact that they drive a car and need to park at a hospital. Health care has always been funded through general taxation, not patient charges, and that principle has been established by all parties. Also, surplus income has been ring-fenced for NHS activities. We run the risk of undermining the philosophical underpinning of the NHS. I accept that this is a cross-party matter, because Labour also sought to deal with it when it was in government.

In practical terms, parking charges cause real hardship for the simple reason that they are a regressive type of taxation that hits the elderly, the poorest and the sickest at the most vulnerable times in their lives. We have heard about various cases today. There are bigger issues involved in the debate, too, including our friends the West Lothian question and the Barnett formula. There is a question of fairness and equity, because people in Wales and Scotland do not suffer a similar encumbrance. Effectively, my constituents in England make a capital payment for free parking at health care facilities in Wales and Scotland, which cannot be right.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Hereford and South Herefordshire (Jesse Norman) said, there is a bigger strategic financial issue to consider—the impact of the private finance initiative, particularly schemes such as that in my local trust, the Peterborough and Stamford Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, which incidentally has a structural annual deficit of £40 million and so finds it difficult to deal with such matters. Both the Treasury and the Department of Health should consider the irreducibility and intractability of the debt encumbrance on such trusts, which forces them to seek finance in that way. I hope that Ministers will think in such wider strategic terms.

[David Wright]

I agree with pretty much everything that the hon. Gentleman has said. One big problem is that many hospital trusts have gone into fairly long-term contractual arrangements with private sector car parking providers. Alongside the broader points that he makes about hospital funding and PFI, the Government should examine the structure of the parking contracts that hospital trusts have put in place. One of the few ways in which they can help in that regard is through national guidance. The Government should take a lead and say to hospital trusts, “You must review this.”

[Mr Jackson]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, and he touches obliquely on another issue—that of transparency, which some of my hon. Friends have mentioned. It should not just be through freedom of information requests by my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow that we get the relevant data before us. Incidentally, my local trust substantially increased its parking revenue from £1.56 million to £1.71 million in one fiscal year. Transparency throws up some perverse practices, such as the fact that at Stamford hospital, in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Grantham and Stamford (Nick Boles), a small community hospital, there is no requirement to pay for parking, but people have to pay at Peterborough hospital, which serves virtually all my constituents. I do not think that is right.

I believe that there is a direct correlation between a wider lack of NHS transparency and high car parking charges. I cannot prove that, but it is my instinct. I say that having found out only a few weeks ago that the interim chief executive of the Peterborough trust was paid more than £400,000 a year for a four-day week. He did a good job, but at some cost to the taxpayer. Parking charges fall within that narrative, because patients should be allowed to know the costs of parking and the income received from it. As my hon. Friends have said, people parking at hospitals are vulnerable, stressed and upset, and things outside their control—bureaucracy, delay, getting the wrong treatment or whatever—can mean that they have to stay at a health care facility, such as a big acute district hospital, for longer than they would otherwise have to.

My hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) made a good point about centres of excellence. In my area, the eastern region, people have to travel 30 or 40 miles. Someone with a child who has a poorly heart might have to travel from south Lincolnshire to Addenbrooke’s hospital or other places, which is difficult.

It would be churlish not to mention the Government’s guidelines. I welcome them, but we need to be tougher and we need a fiscal incentive for trusts to do the right thing—hopefully, abolishing parking charges. We need to punish trusts if they arbitrarily disregard the Government’s guidelines. Hopefully my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow, with his legendary powers of persuasion that we have seen in the past four years, will ask the Chancellor to take the appropriate action. Ultimately, we should work to abolish parking charges completely, because they are an insidious, pernicious tax on the most vulnerable people in our society.