Covid: Free parking for NHS hospital staff in England to end this week

39 comments
  1. I’m sure all the clapping makes up for this eh?

    I think it’s ghoulish enough that anyone has to pay parking at a hospital, but to make staff pay is fucking immoral. This should not be coming back.

  2. I don’t know where parking charges go, but the NHS needs to be able to invent income streams. I’m guessing the NHS benefits in some way from parking charges. I can’t remember which country it was (probably Japan?), but they make a fair amount of money by having care homes and hotels on-site at hospitals. Travelodge or whoever pays rent, people stay there to be close to relatives to avoid daily trips.

  3. Unpopular opinion: this is a good thing. Free parking is subsidising private transport with public money.

    There is no such subsidies for staff to take public transport, there isn’t even any public transport options in a lot of places – a result of decades of money being spent on cars instead of buses.

    It increases car dependency. Low-paid staff, unable to take affordable public transport, are then forced into buying a car, forced to pay astronomical prices for fuel, for tax, for MOTs etc. And then they work long shifts and drive home knackered, which is something that is always advised against because driving whilst tired causes collisions.

    Free parking is *never* free. It costs someone, usually the tax payer.

  4. I’m surprised by this. Not because I’m surprised that they made the decision but because I’m shocked that this was a still a thing. My wife is a nurse at a large city-centre hospital and her free staff parking ended in the middle of last year. She has been paying £6 a day since then.

    On the bright side this isn’t a new cost we will have to bear when her real-terms paycut kicks in, it’s one we already budget for.

  5. Staff _should_ pay for parking. They know where and when they’re going to have to be somewhere and they go there regularly.

    Free parking is a subsidy for everyone who drives cars paid for by people who walk, cycle or takes public transport, it’s not on anymore when we are trying to reduce driving.

    Staff locked into driving to work should be asking for alternatives like buses, rather than for free parking that doesn’t help staff who can’t drive.

  6. I worked for the NHS until 2004. They introduced parking fees for staff in 2003, where I worked. To be automatically deducted from your wages.

  7. No pay rise (to all extents & purposes), terrible pressure & conditions AND you have to pay to park at your workplace? Seriously, what’s the point.

  8. A lot of these NHS trusts have employed Parking Eye and similar, who have a shady record of ensnaring carpark users into paying their inflated fees if there is an error. Some of the arrangements are wholly unsuitable for people using hospitals, for example making users pay for time in advance, when circumstances are likely to have left them needing more time and finding it hard to go out to purchase more – and many other ludicrous stories

  9. If you don’t want staff to have to pay for parking, you should still charge for it but add the cost to everyone’s pay packet. That way you’re not artificially subsidising driving to work but nobody is worse off.

  10. It’s only a matter of time before the hospital toilets will be paid access.

    We’ve been letting people shit for free this whole time!? It’s costing us money!

  11. This is pretty outrageous. Imo they shouldn’t be charging **anybody** for parking at a **hospital**.

    We already pay taxes to run the hospitals, why on earth should we then have to pay to visit them?

  12. this cunting government. i have nothing nice to say about them and i never will, and i’m sick of this shit but the electorate majority of the cuntry seem to be happy to line up for more lashings

  13. They just don’t know when to stop do they? I’m certain there’s a government department of taking the piss. A bunch of old Etonians sit in a committee room in Whitehall working out how best to screw the poor workers.

  14. Why do the staff pay lmao. England fucking crazy. Out of order that especially when you think we pay for the fucking building

  15. Meanwhile, £7 million per month being wasted to store PPE that isn’t needed/can’t be used according to the national audit office. I don’t know how much the parking was costing, but that £7 million seems like it would be a decent chunk towards covering it.

  16. I took a hospital job at the start of the pandemic to do my bit, initially parking was fine and free as there was no parking for visitors and the car parks were temporarily free, but then it was ‘you can park for free if you have a staff permit’. The waiting list for a permit was 2 years. Without it I had to park 15 minutes walk away on a residential street known for locals smashing windows as they were sick of hospital staff parking on their road. Some days there wouldn’t be any spaces so I’d have to park further away in rougher areas. To park in paid parking anywhere near the hospital would have cost a significant portion of my wages.

    Its outrageous to have to pay to go to work to make money just so you can afford to work there.

  17. I took a hospital job at the start of the pandemic to do my bit, initially parking was fine and free as there was no parking for visitors and the car parks were temporarily free, but then it was ‘you can park for free if you have a staff permit’. The waiting list for a permit was 2 years. Without it I had to park 15 minutes walk away on a residential street known for locals smashing windows as they were sick of hospital staff parking on their road. Some days there wouldn’t be any spaces so I’d have to park further away in rougher areas. To park in paid parking anywhere near the hospital would have cost a significant portion of my wages.

    Its outrageous to have to pay to go to work to make money just so you can afford to work there.

  18. We’re experiencing the worst drop in living standards and rising costs of living since the 50s and now they want to take even more money.????
    Fucking hell

  19. I went for an interview at a hospital a month or so ago and they said that parking comes out of their wages monthly

  20. I’m sorry as someone who didn’t clap for the NHS once I will take responsibility for this and will promise to clap next pandemic

  21. It is absolutely revolting that NHS have to pay to park to go to work, especially when they are criminally underpaid too. The disrespect and disregard from those in power for our healthcare workers is shameful.

  22. I can’t imagine they would do it for fun, but you seem to think they’re not doing it for transport.

    Why not look at free public transport as the morally right thing to do?

  23. Just blame it on the Tories. The Tories will tell these businesses, if you want lots of money, go after the working class. The Tories Say, where there’s muck there’s money. And that’s how they view the working class.

  24. And in my trust last month several nurses finished 12.5 hour shifts to find their catalytic converters nicked.

    Wouldn’t mind so much about paying if they actually monitored the car park.

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