Hospital trust makes more than £1m in parking fees

Google A full car park with rows of cars and a tree standing in the middle with large beige-brick buildings in the distance.Google
Visitors to the hospitals have to pay if they stay more than 20 minutes

A hospital trust collected £1.1m from car parking charges in 2023/2024.

Data from NHS England shows the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital Trust (SaTH) also spent £91,000 on parking services during that period.

Helen Troalen, director of finance at SaTH, said the trust was not making a profit from the charges and promised the surplus would be spent on "frontline services and further parking solutions".

Charges at the hospitals in Shrewsbury and Telford start from £3.50 for up to two hours and up to £8.50 for 24 hours.

Figures from NHS England show that across the country NHS trusts collected £242.8m in car parking fees and spent £77.2m of that to run parking services.

Ms Troalen said the charges were "not a decision SaTH takes lightly" and had remained at the same level since the Covid pandemic.

She also said the £91,000 was spent on "the maintenance of the car parks, off-site car parking and the staff park-and-ride services at both hospital sites".

Over the same period, the Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic Hospital in Gobowen collected £270,000 in car parking charges.

The data showed the trust also spent £103,000 on parking services, which meant it made a total of £167,000 from parking.

Phil Davies, head of estates and facilities at the hospital, said: "The revenue generated in our car parks is fully re-invested back into hospital services and patient care."

This news was gathered by the Local Democracy Reporting Service which covers councils and other public service organisations.

Follow BBC Shropshire on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.