Healthcare in Scotland is a devolved issue, and since 2008 most hospital parking charges here have been abolished, with the exception of a small number of hospitals where the Scottish Government have claimed that, due to contractual reasons, it would be prohibitively expensive to abolish charges.
I am glad that, here in Scotland, hospital parking charges are no longer being used as a stealth tax, as they were by Labour and the Liberal Democrats when they were in power in Holyrood. Nobody should be punished for needing to visit the hospital, and I believe that extortionate charges have no place in the NHS.
However, it is at the same time important that free parking does not lead to people who are not visiting the hospital using its parking for other purposes. In some Scottish hospitals, there have been reports of there being so few available parking spaces that people visiting the hospital have had to park significant distances away.
While permit or registration schemes may solve this issue to some extent, it is important that these schemes are simple and convenient to use, and that people who, though visiting the hospital, inadvertently fall foul of the scheme are not punished with extortionate fines.
I hope that, when considering what course of action to take with respect to hospital parking fines, the UK Government will take Scotland’s experience with free parking into account, and formulate a policy that ensures that people needing to visit the hospital can park near it without being used as a cash cow.