Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what (a) recent discussions he has had and (b) discussions he plans to have with Southend University Hospital about its policy towards car parking charges; and if he will make a statement.

No discussions are planned or have taken place between the Department’s Ministers and officials and Southend University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust about car parking operations.

The Department has also made no assessment of the level of income Southend University Hospital has received from car parking operations. Decisions on hospital car parking, including charging, are taken locally by National Health Service foundation trusts and NHS trusts. We published the NHS patient, visitor and staff car parking principles on 23 August 2014, which set out a nationally consistent approach for hospitals to take to car parking. The principles are available at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nhs-patient-visitor-and-staff-car-parking-principles

To help NHS organisations deliver the above principles we later published NHS Car Parking Management: Environment and Sustainability (HTM 07-03) on 25 March 2015. This guidance is available at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nhs-car-parking-management-htm-07-03