My hon. Friend is right. The fact is that in September 2014 the then Health Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich (Dr Poulter), noted in a debate that 40% of hospitals now do not charge for hospital car parking. They are likely to be in rural areas where there is less demand for parking—where it is easier to provide parking and there is less pressure on it. I suspect the reality is that a hospital with a car park in a central location in a busy town or a major city centre has no choice but to have a car parking charge. That is the reality of life. If it were be free, there would just be chaos; essentially, it would mean that those who really needed to get close to the hospital would not be able to do so. There has to be some system in place to protect the spaces that are close to the hospital for those who need them. Whatever system we have, there is no simple answer to that.
What we do know is that the present system of having local decision making is working. Fairfield hospital allows 30 minutes of free parking for everyone; then it costs just £1 for up to one hour. In the constituency of the hon. Member for Burnley, by contrast, people would pay £1.90 for up to three hours’ parking. There is a huge disparity across the country. We heard earlier—in an intervention from the hon. Member for Streatham
(Mr Umunna), I think—about the costs in central London, which are understandably very much higher than in the provinces.
While the Bill does explain the generality of what is required, it does not explain how the system would work in practice. In the opening remarks of the hon. Member for Burnley, she mentioned that the system would work by way of having a badge in the car window. I am happy to be corrected if I misheard. That is the first time I had heard that. It would perhaps have helped all of us if that had been in an explanatory note saying this was how the scheme would work. She also mentioned that in some hospitals people have to pay on entry—I think the hon. Lady is nodding from a sedentary position. That is all very well, but I am not quite sure how simply having a voucher in the car window would help in that scenario. It must be more complex than that, and some sort of token would be needed in order to get through the barrier.