My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. People in rural areas or who live far away from their local hospitals are unfairly affected by having poor transport networks to ferry them to hospitals, so they have no choice but to travel by car.
The right hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead (Sir Mike Penning) made the excellent point that other emergency workers are not being required to pay to park at their police or fire stations. In addition, hospital staff, by taking up parking spaces, are reducing the number of spaces for patients and visitors. NHS staff should be able to park for free, but they should also be able to afford to live nearer the hospital. It is therefore ironic that we are in a situation in which NHS trusts are forced to sell land that could have been used to house NHS staff locally.
Another pressure on North Middlesex Hospital has been the fact that the closure of the accident and emergency unit at Chase Farm has resulted in far more
visitors to its A&E unit. Those additional visits meant that, between Christmas and new year, the hospital ran out of acute beds. One can only imagine how busy the hospital car park was during that period.
Many hon. Members have made excellent contributions about the need for the Government to abolish car parking charges. It is time that those unfair charges were scrapped and the NHS properly funded. For the sake of NHS staff, parents and visitors, I ask the Minister to bring forward measures to scrap car parking charges as soon as possible.
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