I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that important point.
We all need to understand that carer’s allowance is not dished out willy-nilly. To qualify, a person has to devote at least 35 hours a week to caring for a person with substantial care needs, and many carers provide far more hours than that. To fulfil their caring role, they often have no option but to work reduced hours, and some are forced to give up work altogether. They often face a steep drop in income if they have to leave work or reduce their hours in order to care, and there is sometimes a double loss of salary if they are caring for a partner who also has to give up work as a result of their illness or disability. Some 2.3 million people have given up work to care, and that loss of income is often coupled with a steep rise in expenditure as a result of the additional costs of caring and disability, including travel and parking costs as they support the person they care for to attend medical appointments or continue to provide care during stays in hospital.
One carer, Jackie, shared her story with me. She cares full time for her husband David, who has secondary progressive multiple sclerosis and hairy cell leukaemia. She said:
“As David’s wife and sole carer, I was at the hospital every day from 9.30 am until 7 pm. We live 22 miles from the hospital and rely on benefits as our sole income—so the expense of travelling to and from hospital every day and paying the parking charges was huge. We exhausted the little savings we had. Weekly parking tickets were available and cheaper than daily charges, but I never knew how long my husband would be in hospital for. The last thing I needed was to be worrying about car parking charges when I was anxious about whether my husband was going to make it or not. Carers are at such a disadvantage already, car parking charges are one extra penalty they do not need.”
For carers, fulfilling their caring role often involves parking at hospitals for hours on end day after day, week after week. Hospital parking charges place an unfair financial burden on those caring for disabled, seriously ill or older friends or family members. NHS hospital trusts and foundation trusts are responsible for setting their own charging policies and are not currently required under law to provide any exemptions. Some hospitals in England already provide free car parking, and others offer some concessions, although these are few and far between and invariably poorly advertised.