Express & Star comment: Should hospital parking be free?
The cherished National Health Service, free at the point of use.
Remember that as you put in your coins, notes, or card to pay the hefty hospital parking charge.
It's not all that long ago that hospitals had free parking.
So it is possible to have a financial model for the NHS in which patients and their loved ones are not stung by parking fees when they are at their most vulnerable.
Yet the parking charges are now so cemented into the moneymaking mechanisms of hospitals that it is difficult to see what forces could be brought to bear to abolish them.
Look at the local figures. Hospital trusts are making millions from motorists. For instance, The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust received £2.6 million.
In the rural county of Shropshire, the Telford and Shrewsbury hospitals made over £600,000 just from staff.
There is always the argument that if they lose the parking income, how will the funding gap be bridged?
At least boiling everything down to finances is honest.
The environmental justifications for slapping on charges as a way of forcing people to catch the bus to hospital, or walk there, have never convinced.
As the reality is that most people arrive at hospital by car, and if you have tried to find a parking space at peak times at our local hospitals you will know that efforts to dissuade them from doing so have failed, the parking charges are equivalent to a hospital admission charge, or an arrival tax.
This turns on its head the ethos of the NHS, that all taxpayers pay towards it for the general good. In practice, there is an additional tax imposed direct on the users at point of use.
It doesn't have to be like this. While there is simmering resentment about hospital parking charges, all it needs is political will, and for people to make a choice, for them to be abolished.
In Wales, parking at hospitals is free. In England, big tax rises could get rid of the charges and bring much-needed extra cash into NHS coffers.
Which brings us to the crucial question. Would people vote for it?
