I am very grateful to be able to take part in this important debate. I congratulate the right hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon), my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Emma Hardy), and my neighbour, the hon. Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers), on securing it.
Diana, Princess of Wales Hospital in my constituency provides a range of helpful wellbeing services. The site has an A&E, a dialysis unit, a child development unit, a nursery, an eating disorder unit, and health education spaces. It covers a huge range of services that deliver to a very wide community. There are two main areas that I want to address: first, the difficulties and challenges for patients caused by ever-increasing parking tariffs; and, secondly, car parking issues for staff, which have been raised with me on a number of occasions when I have been at Grimsby’s hospital.
In Grimsby, I can go and park in the Iceland car park, in the centre of our town, for £1 an hour. If I need to park for more than two hours, I might go to the Abbey Walk multi-storey, again in the centre of town, and pay £3.50 for the privilege of four hours’ parking. Having worked in places like York, I know that I should be very grateful for the seemingly small amounts that it costs to park in the centre of our town, so I count my blessings. When those smaller amounts are set against what people are expected to pay in hospital parking charges, it feels very much to my constituents as though the NHS is over-inflating the expense and putting an unnecessary burden on patients and families.
The charge for an hour’s parking at Diana, Princess of Wales Hospital has recently increased to £2.10— £1.10 more than in the centre of our town. If I go to the hospital to pick up a prescription, it might take—on a good day, admittedly—just a few minutes to collect the prescription, but on top of the prescription cost, I am paying another £2.10 to do so. Last week, I went for a blood test. I walked in, got my ticket, checked on the screen, and saw that there was a wait of about 68 minutes. It took me a matter of minutes to get the blood test, but the sitting in the waiting room lasted about 68 minutes. The cost of that visit was therefore £3.50. I am not bemoaning the cost to my personal pocket. I can afford it, but many in my constituency cannot, and the cost is prohibitive.