Forum Topic

West Middx Hospital Parking

Just tried out the new parking arrangements at the hospital. At the entry the barrier now rises automatically - there's no need to take a ticket. After parking the car, complete appointment task and then return to the machines in the lobby. Enter your car registration, wait for the amount owing to be displayed and then pay. Return to your car and drive to the exit barrier which will automatically rise as you approach it. Job done - the only snag is prices have increased. I paid £2 for first hour when it used to be £1.50 - a 333% increase

Eric Dicker ● 2629d17 Comments

I don't mind paying to park at hospitals, most of which are well served by public transport but the arrangements in London have always been quite bad, like having to pay and display so having to guess how long you would be, machines that took only coins etc.Out in the Chilterns where my parents lived, you just took a ticket on entry, then could pay with coins, notes or cards on exit. Just like an ordinary car park. Not need for number plate recognition or any such faffing about.

Susan Kelly ● 2625d

Given that it appears to work on  number plate recognition, some way of capping costs should be possible for those visiting.I gave up on 4 wheeled transport in London a while ago, and recommend, to those who can, learning to ride a moped. Parking, fuel, insurance and congestion are all problems that disappear or are hugely reduced for moped users, and therefore make life easier for those who cannot ride a moped (or motorbike), by freeing up capacity for others.

Christopher Gillie ● 2626d

Another of the problems that you can get with hospital parking is when appointments are block booked so that a large number of people arrive for appointments at the same time.  You can then have people driving round and round looking for a space at the same time whilst becoming more and more stressed as the time of their appointment gets closer and closer.  The question asked by Sarah Spain I think earlier in the thread was whether you can be let through the barrier to park when there are no parking spaces and what happens if there is no overflow parking.Some hospitals do offer a reduced rate for parking when you are having to visit very regularly/spending a long time there and I remember having to get a form from the ward clerk. It does make visiting less stressful when there is good info about when visiting hours are and whether you can stay to help a patient eating their food - as well as giving info on public transport!  If the public transport is good then there may not need to be so much parking.

Philippa Bond ● 2626d

Nice anecdote. He was, mostly, truly awful. This page collates a number of polls that rank the performance of Prime Ministers:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_Prime_Ministers_of_the_United_KingdomGordon Brown does spectacularly badly.

Christopher Gillie ● 2627d

I bumped in Gordon Brown in the BA lounge one morning many years ago.  He looked quite tired and worn out, but not one to miss an opportunity, I asked him if it made economic sense to announce to the whole the whole world that he was going to sell the gold reserves off just before he started doing it. He'd driven the gold price to a 20-year low.  I was going to go onto his 'no more boom and bust' statement but he dissapeared off with coffee and butty in hand, mumbling to himself.

Lorne Gifford ● 2627d

Your suggestion has a lot of merit. As things stand it behaves as a very unfair tax.

Christopher Gillie ● 2627d

More about taxation than parking at West Mid!  Might I suggest that the hospital brings in a discounted season ticket for those having to visit daily and for long stretches of time - such as when visiting a sick and dying patient.  Long hours of sitting by a bedside can rack up a lots of money for the parking.  Many cannot afford that outlay.

Jennifer Selig ● 2627d

Under the old system at West Middlesex hospital you didnt have to worry about time running out.  You paid on departure.  Yup i have been in hospital car parks in the other places where you had to pay upfront, and then run out of time if your appointment ran late!!!  This new system just seems to be elbowing the actual ticket process.  The ticket machines were always breaking i remember!

Emma Renton ● 2627d

I agree with you. Mostly. But - Labour did not "save while the sun shined". Gordon Brown "abolished" boom and bust. He was ok as a chancellor to start with, but a particularly poor PM.I agree that ever increasing allowances are not good. This is why I say they need to be frozen. Chasing tax cheats is a good idea. If it could be legal, I would support a whistleblower bonus payment!That is thin gruel however. Persuading 20 million people to pay £100-£200 extra, on average, for universal services, intsead of "ambush taxes" on people who need to visit hospital frequently is more sane.

Christopher Gillie ● 2627d

I've never been to this car park but does the new system mean that whilst in the hospital you aren't stressed about the time on the ticket you've bought running out with the worry that you'll get fined?  This increases the stress levels of patients visiting hospital which must increase the likelihood of arguments with staff - or anybody for that matter.

Philippa Bond ● 2627d

Hi ChrisI think we're talking about very similar things from a similar point of view. but using different analogies and text that is confusing each other.NI increases are not OK, they're just a way of promising 'we won't increase income tax rates' and then increasing the other income, but not called income, tax we all pay; NI.  Don't remember who introduced the idea, but believe it might have been the scotsman who also sold all our gold reserves because he'd stopped boom and bust cycles.Mansion tax is an example of a proposal for a new tax that would be paid by a few, but was supported my the vast majority.  It was planned as 1% of house value per year, hence £30k a year for a reasonably nice house.  House value would of course have instantly crashed to just below the mansion tax level, so no revenue would have been raised.On overall tax take you need to consider all forms of tax income.  Stamp-duty and various other taxes make a heck of a difference to the revenue take. Average time between buying and selling a home I believe is in the region of 5 to 8 years, so stamp duty is something people pay time and again, with perhaps 20% of home owners paying it in any one year.Slower growth due to uncertainty and unwillingness to invest, plus the fist signs of quantitative easing inflation showing up.Agree deficit is being closed, if I were a synic I'd suggest that many Conservative governments spent their term in office sorting out the economic imprudence of the previous Labour one, which leads to the Labour opposition shouting about cutting this that and the other, getting voted back in and then spending money they don't have again.

Lorne Gifford ● 2628d

Chris, I was with you all the way until 'huge Labour deficit', by which I assume you meant 'result of global financial crisis' - and Tory governments have run and are running even huger deficits. But if we want better public services, including cheaper hospital parking, we have to pay for it, preferably through progressive and redistributive taxation of income and wealth. Increasing personal allowances is a snare, as it helps higher earners more than those at the bottom it's supposed to be aimed at, and removing the income cap on National Insurance contributions would help. Capping council tax at Band H is also a nonsense, particularly in London. And then there are the multinational companies and 'high worth individuals' with convoluted arrangements in tax havens.... That should give us a few more parking spaces!

Peter Evans ● 2628d

Hi LorneAt the end of the day, we need to balance tax and spend, while growing ourselves to a more prosperous future. My fear is that tax and spend is now too low.If NI is another kind of income tax why is NI increase ok but income tax not?"favoured by those that wont pay it" is just not true. They do pay it, the numbers I sent show they pay it, and they pay a lot more than anyone else, and I am grateful that they pay it. Where does your assertion come from? the numbers do not bear it out, so I do not know where this is coming from?Cutting tax to to pay for services does not work either. Talking about the Mansion tax is odd. I was talking income tax. 1p in income tax would mean your income must be £3 million a year to pay £30k more tax a year, which means parking fees are not a big problem. I did not say Brazil was in the "same basket", but they are a country, and we have have a similar tax take to them, lower than most 1st world countries. Less tax means fewer universal services, which means less help for the poor and disadvantaged, and more income for the rich. How little do we want to help each other?Reducing funding for public services means reduced funding for public salaries, which is a major cause of economic drag.Stamp duty only affect house buyers and so only affect a tiny number of people in any given year and are so cyclical. That is one of the worst ways to tax anyone. It encourages geographic inertia and distorts the housing market. So this suggestion is, I submit, a very poor one.Bexit devalued our currency, and yet the extra competitiveness this should have imparted to has has resulted in ever slower growth. The balance of tax has moved to the point where ever more squeezing of tax and public spending is damaging. The classic Keynsian spend your way out of a recession was not possible 10 years ago due to the huge Labour deficit, but the deficit has been mostly closed, and I think taxes have been cut too far.Food for thought.ThanksChris

Christopher Gillie ● 2628d

Sorry Chris, couple more points.  Not having a go at you incidentally as all opinions and thoughts are fully justified:- Your suggestion wouldn't be going back to an overall earn and tax profile we had 3 years ago, as we don't live with the same earn or spend profile. Just ask the millions in the squeezed middle that have seen stagnant income combined with rising prices.  WMH parking has gone up 33% this year, council tax has gone up 4%, and so on- If you're after a bigger tax take then why not freeze something like the kick-in values for stamp duty rates instead?  Or better still, why not make it a blanket 12% stamp duty on every house or flat (which is the rate currently paid by more expensive homes)?  You could happily argue that such a thing would raise billions for the exchequer and only take it from those that clearly have surplus income because they have enough money to buy a home.  Very persuasive and no doubt something that would be wholeheartedly favoured by anyone not planning on buying their own home or moving from where they are.  But what would that do to the housing market? And if the housing market suddenly stagnates or collapses, as it has done several times before, what does that do to stamp-duty revenue?- A 1% income rise in itself probably won't collapse the economy, but bear in mind that right now the UK economy is in a very fragile state. Incomes are not keeping up with price rises, brexit has devalued our currency by around 15% and will add considerably more cost and strain over the next few years, and the massive injection of cash that was quantitative easing is only just beginning to work through to increasing inflation.Overall, my thoughts are that the parking price rise at WMH is very annoying, particularly as I use that car park quite a lot, is inconsistent with surrounding parking charges, and is being pushed onto an almost captive customer base as an easy solution to make some extra cash.

Lorne Gifford ● 2628d

Hi ChrisDon't want to move this thread away from parking charges at WMH, but in response to your response:- I'm well aware of the tax take higher up the income scale and equally well aware that NI is just another name for a tax that isn't saved up by the gvmt but immediately spent.  - I'm also well aware that any rise in any tax will be favoured by those that won't pay it and not favoured by those that will. Make it a 'progressive tax' and add in a one liner like 'it's only a little extra from those with broad shoulders who can afford it' and you've got yourself a very undemocratic vote winner.  As the fiasco over Mansion Tax proved, which wouldn't have raised a single penny for the NHS incidentally, everyone loves a tax that 'someone else will pay' and is quite happy to dismiss a £30k+ annual tax burden on a house like mine with flippant comments such as 'it's just the cost of a lunch'- Jacking tax up to solve problems doesn't work. It's been proven time and again, and yet it's such as easy thing to do that our more simple minded governments have tried it time and again.Brazil incidentally is the 8th largest economy in the world so I'd refrain from putting them in the same basket as actual third-world economies.

Lorne Gifford ● 2628d

Hi LorneNI is just a tax, and is not hypothecated for the NHS, Pensions or anything else. Paying it does accrue pension entitlements, but your contributions are not saved up in order to fund it or anything else. It just goes into the big central pot.If you go to the ONS and download the statistics, 90% of income tax is paid by the top 50% (the number I think you are referring to), but to say the middle pays most of it is just not true. Middle income earners pay 22.6% of income tax. The top 5% of taxpayers pay almost half of all income tax. Looking it more closely:0 - 1%  - 0%0 - 5%  - 0.1%0 - 10% - 0.4%0 - 25% - 2.2%25%-50% - 7.7%50%-75% - 14.9%Top 25% - 75.6% Top 10% - 59.7%Top 5%  - 48.4%Top 1%  - 27.9%One penny more income tax for someone on £45k is about £330 a year.The changes to personal allowance from 10k to 11.85k have been a £370 tax cut.Just changing your bank account can easily earn you the cost of 1p on income tax. I am asking to go back to a tax take we had about 3 years ago, and freezing the increase in personal allowances. Your assertion that tax will collapse the economy is not true. Extremely high tax will do that (nobody can be bothered to work), as will extremely low tax (we would not be able to afford to even run the basics like defence and police). One penny will not make any difference, and I cannot understand why you think NI is ok but income tax is not. They are basically the same thing.Our tax as % of GDP is already very low. If you go to this list - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenue_to_GDP_ratio and sort by %, look at the countries at the top and at the bottom.Developed economies with high standards of living tend to be at the top of the list.It is true there are outliers like Switzerland and the USA, but the USA has almost no tax funded healthcare, and that costs them about 15% of GDP so that would put them at about 41%, more like Canada, and the Swiss are a tax haven with lots of millionaires, artificially distorting their numbers.The UK is at 34.4%, the same as Brazil. (Also next to Australia, which has had a China exports commodity boom for the last 2 decades so is not really comparable).

Christopher Gillie ● 2628d

I wonder what will happen when the car park is full. Will you still be allowed in and then how do you get out if there are no spaces? Parking fines are also given if you don't park in a bay so beware!

Sarah Spain ● 2628d

You know the 'squeezed middle' does actually exist, and is being squeezed of every drop of spare income tighter than an orange in an orange squeezer.90% of income tax comes from those on an average or better salaries and whilst the very rich may well deploy all the accountants and tricks to reduce their tax, that middle level doesn't.Put 1% on income tax is an easy, 'off the cuff' solution, but the reality is that it's not a solution as all it'll do is add to the collapse in the economy.  The economy needs money in it to generate the revenue and growth to pay tax.Anyway, NI (employers and employees) is suppose to pay for the NHS, and surprisingly its revenue actually more of less identical to NHS spending, so why not suggest hiking that up?

Lorne Gifford ● 2629d

I guess it is just a typo, and you mean a 33% increase. Sounds easy to use though.Given the tiny increases in funding and the huge increase in demand, something has to give. I would rather it was parking fees than healthcare. What would make more sense is increases in mainstream taxation. 1p on each band should raise enough money.

Christopher Gillie ● 2629d