Health Bill [HL]

My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Palmer, was unable to move this amendment in Committee, we did not get the chance to talk about it. I wish to give him some support, although I have no doubt that the Government will not. I know that the Scottish Executive have introduced measures of this kind; indeed, they have gone further and are bringing in measures to stop hospitals raising revenue from car parks. The amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Palmer, does not go that far. I support the noble Lord’s amendment for two reasons. First, members of the public are angered beyond measure because they believe that they have no choice in many cases other than to take private transport to hospitals, when they are put in a situation where the NHS is making money from their disadvantage. The amendment is important, secondly, because there are some patients for whom car parking fees at hospital are detrimental to their healthcare. Many years ago, when I worked in Age Concern, we did a study on non-emergency patient transport, which in those days was being cut back so severely that many older people were forced to make private arrangements to go to hospital. We called our report A Helicopter Would Be Nice, because that is what one of the people said to us. We found older people not going to hospital for appointments that they needed until they could arrange for their relatives to fly back from abroad to take them, or until they could rely on neighbours to take them. Time and again in our research, the stress of car parking and of taking people to hospital and having to run in and out of A&E departments to make sure that the parking meter was topped up came through as something that was not conducive to older people’s health and well-being. The noble Lord, Lord Palmer, has in a limited way hit on a big problem, which the NHS has a duty at least to examine. If all that it does is come clean about the amount of money that it is making from car parking, it would be a great step forward.