Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what plans his Department has to review NHS organisations' responses to the Patient-Led Assessments of the Care Environment and whether (a) they provide car parking charge concessions in accordance with the NHS patient, visitor and staff car parking principles and (b) information about the concessionary scheme is prominently publicised.

The National Health Service patient, visitor and staff car parking principles, published on 23 August 2014, ask NHS hospitals to publish:

- their parking policy;

- their implementation of the NHS car parking principles;

- financial information relating to their car parking arrangements; and

- summarised complaint information on car parking and actions taken in response.

We expect this information to be displayed prominently on trust websites so that patients and the public can hold the NHS locally to account where unfair parking charges and practices remain in place.

Results from the 2015 Patient-Led Assessments of the Care Environment (someished car parking princioplesll NHS organisations to take steps to ensurePLACE) collection show that over 75% of sites that charge for car parking currently operate a concessions scheme and display it prominently. We are disappointed that this means a number of hospital boards have not yet decided to follow the best practice set out in the principles.

To check compliance with the principles, the same PLACE questions will be asked in 2016 and we expect to see an improvement in the results.