Hospital car parking plan is zealotry or money-grubbing

Published: 25 November, 2010

• THE Whittington Hospital Trust’s parking plans (“…extra parking charges for gas guzzling vehicles.” November 18) are arbitrary, presumptuous disproportionate and unreasonable. 

It is not the business of an NHS trust, a quango and not an elected representative democratic body, to undertake this kind of economic and social ordering of the life choices of all citizens by financial penalty. Whatever the merits of the argument it is simply not their business. 

It has nothing to do with the efficient management of a hospital car park. 

The proposed basis of discriminatory parking charges has no reasonable connection with their duties. 

Thus, they appear to propose to act in an arbitrary and presumptuous manner and beyond their powers; in short, seeming to act in a way that should provoke a healthy response from local MPs and the legally minded defenders of individual liberty. 

The arbitrary and disproportionate nature of what is proposed lies in the fact that the reported basis of charging will have nothing to do with fairness or reasonableness. Many poorer, older and sometimes disabled people often drive old, larger, vehicles (that consume above average fuel) for reasons of both medical and capital necessity; some of them, no doubt, without the financial means to replace such a vehicles; particularly now in these hard times. 

To be consistent, will the trust introduce other financial penalties for other individual carbon-related consumer preferences of which they do not approve? 

Will there be a charge for those entering hospital premises wearing leather shoes, belts and gloves manufactured from cattle whose excrement causes one of the world’s most potent causes of man ordained global warming, methane gas? 

Will those known to use aircraft for holidays in distant places also be charged for hospital treatment on the ground that they do not holiday at home and thus contribute to the presence of carbon?  

And are we to assume that trust members do none of these things? That might be a line of enquiry pregnant with all sorts possibilities.  

At the back of all this one suspects the sickening likelihood that if not pure zealotry it is merely a reprehensible construction for getting more money from car parking, at the expense of the humanitarian expectation that all individuals are given reasonable, fair and equal visiting rights.

ROBERT SUTHERLAND SMITH Widecombe Way, N2