Hospital Parking Charges (Exemption for Carers) Bill
Debate between Rupa Huq and David Nuttall(9 years, 1 month ago)
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Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Burnley (Julie Cooper) on her important private Member’s Bill from which, thanks to Conservative Members’ contributions, a somewhat epic debate has ensued. I am pleased to speak in favour of the Bill. I have broken my usual rule of Fridays in Ealing Action and Bedford Park to be here since 9.30 am. The Bill is an important piece of legislation, which we need. I shall be brief.
It is important to point out that we are talking about carers who are in receipt of carer’s allowance of £62.10 a week. To receive this, they have to do at least 35 hours of caring for an older or disabled person, and they are not allowed any extra income above £110 a week. The state is paying these people in recognition of their caring duties, which take a burden off the health service. If all that is going on car parking fees, then it is a false economy. Waiving their car parking fees alone would pay dividends for the future.
I have elderly parents; in fact, I lost my father a year ago.
Dr Huq
I need to do a TV interview that I am late for, so I wish to make progress; I will not be giving way.
My parents have had all sorts of ailments. We lost my dad a year ago last September so I have been in and out of Ealing hospital as a visitor, and I have grumbled that it seems to cost no less than £4 for an in-and-out visit. People on carer’s allowance can be there for days on end, or hours on end, and the cost for them can rack up into the hundreds. This is even more punitive given that they are on £62.10 a week and bear a heavy burden as it is.
For these carers, the stress of parking is at best, the last thing they need, as my hon. Friend the Member for Burnley said, and at worst, on a more generous interpretation, bordering on a slap in the face. They are people who negotiate difficult situations. My own mother has dementia, and people with such conditions can fly off the handle and be quite erratic. If someone is negotiating that, or, say, dealing with someone’s incontinence pads, they do not want to be fumbling about for the correct change, as my hon. Friend so graphically described. This is the least we can do, as a decent society, in recognition of the enormous contribution that carers make. They are almost the social glue of the NHS; it would fall apart without them.
Yesterday in this Chamber we discussed benefit changes and how the safety net is tightening. It is important to consider these parking charges, which are sky-high in any case. In 2008, my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, Southall (Mr Sharma) said to the local press that they are a stealth tax on the poor. They are already steep, but disproportionately so for carers. We heard research quoted earlier. Leeds University and Carers UK have estimated that £119 billion a year is saved on the adult social care bill through having these unpaid carers who just receive an allowance.
Conservative Members have said that it is fine to exercise discretion. At Ealing hospital, that amounts to a handful of spaces, and there are quite strict criteria. Often, a situation that would result in an unpaid carer taking the person they care for into hospital would arise from sudden things that cannot be predicted, and the four spaces, or whatever, that some London North West Healthcare NHS Trust hospitals reserve as part of their discretionary allocation may be gone.
Members on both sides of the House are lobbied all the time from powerful groups with identical emails that clog up our in-boxes, but this is about people who are the unsung heroes of our system. It should not be those who shout the loudest—the powerful lobby groups—who get their way. According to the figure I got from the House of Commons Library last night, there are 944,000 of these unsung heroes, but I have heard different figures here today. Anyway, on the basis of a cost-benefit analysis, a substantial number of people are saving the NHS money in this way. It is a matter of respect that as a country we should be saying thank you to these carers and we should appreciate their vital contribution. We have the power to change all this today and to deal with the fact that they are being penalised.
We would not want carers to be put off going to hospital because of these charges. That is the logical extension of the 81% rise in NHS West London CCG’s car parking charges. When I lobbied it and said that this is a constant issue in my postbag and my in-box, I was told, “It’s the commercial car parking providers you should take this up with.” Does the House want to be seen to be siding with commercial car parking providers or with carers in our society?
Campaign groups such as Contact a Family, the Alzheimer’s Society and the Multiple Sclerosis Society are all supporting this Bill. Even The Sun, which is not usually a newspaper that supports Labour, is backing the Park the Charges campaign.
Dr Huq
Not in recent times. It has not supported the Labour party in any recent general election. Historically, Rupert Murdoch’s politics are not aligned with ours.
I urge Members in all parts of this House to do the decent thing and support this Bill in the strongest possible terms. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Burnley on leading this extraordinary debate. I suppose I should also congratulate some Conservative Members on the show of stamina to which they have subjected us.