I see the media is stirring hospital parking charges up again, easy cheap stories to fill loads of space.

Car parks are not cheap to build and maintain, the money has to come from somewhere, should hospitals spend their medical funds on parking or on medicine.

Yes, everybody wants free parking everywhere but the press should not stir up this sort of rubbish.

Take Arrowe park,
Depending on which car park your in will depend on what the cost is.

Main Entrance
1 fee per visit.

Round the back
Free upto 3 or 4 hrs and then £10....

These car parks have there own rules which makes it confusing and expensive.

Lets face it these car parks are full of staff parking anyway. At Arrowe Park there is more parking allocated to Staff than the Public.

Hospital car parks should balance each year, and a percentage put to one side for investment / repairs.

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Hospital car parks around the country vary so much it's impossible to keep up.

The disparity of fees at APH is because APH do not directly control the charges in some of the car parks, the use of the land which is the southern car park was a concession by the council given some time way after APH opened. The main car park in front of the hospital does belong to APH and has their standard parking fee.

Staff (with the exception of some mobile jobs) pay for using the staff car parks.

Concessions are available for those that can't afford the parking.

If people keep moaning then the hospitals will close all their car parks and encourage NCP or whoever to build their own car parks in the vicinity which is far from the best solution.

The money has to come from somewhere, if it doesn't come from parking charges where should it come from?

"The money has to come from somewhere, if it doesn't come from parking charges where should it come from?"

Perhaps the same place as all the other hospital costs. Public paying twice..taxes and parking fees.

Clatterbridge is very expensive .Was costing us between £30 and £40 a week just to visit our son twice a day 7 days. Think prices are designed to stop it being used as a park and ride. After a couple of weeks managed to find a free place in the evenings.

At least APH is free.

But supplying visitor parking isn't their core function, any money spent building and maintaining car parks comes out of their NHS budget - less staff, less equipment, less medicine and less treatment is the consequence.

APH is just spending £500,000 at the moment on rehashing the bus area and providing 100 more parking places. That's £5000 per parking slot they need to recoup. At £3.20 a visit, that is 1565 visits per slot just to break even on the creation of those parking slots - then there is interest and maintenance to pay for.