New car parking charges at West Suffolk Hospital

24 June 2003

Car parking charges are to be increased at the West Suffolk Hospital in Bury St Edmunds.  The new charges were approved by a meeting of the West Suffolk Hospitals NHS Trust board on Friday 20 June.

Patients and visitors will now be charged a flat rate of £2.00 per stay. Previously, the charge was £1.50 for a stay of up to 2 hours and £2.00 for longer.

The hospital’s existing system of giving visitors to long term in-patients free parking will remain, as will other measures to help people in special need. Visitors making several trips a day to the hospital will be able to retain their tickets.

The Trust is also increasing the charge to staff for parking from 35p per occasion to 40p.  The new charging structure will take effect from 1^st August.

The new charges will increase the money raised from car parking by an additional £44,800 which will help to pay for improvements and maintenance of the car parks. Each day about 9,000 cars are driven on to the site which currently has 1,000 spaces.

“Car parking is a problem on the West Suffolk Hospital site, because there are simply too many cars arriving every day for the number of spaces available,” said acting director of facilities Steve Moore. “We are currently building an extra 240 car parking spaces at a cost of £540,000.

“We cannot allow the cost of trying to solve our car parking problems to divert money away from other activities, such as patient care. Similarly, money raised from car parking charges is being spent on developing more car parking spaces and is not used to raise general Trust revenues.

“We are constantly looking at ways to alleviate the problem of having too many cars on site.  However, I would encourage all visitors to take the environmentally friendly option of using public transport whenever possible, and walking and cycling if weather and distances allow.”