Hospital trust makes more than £1m in parking fees

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.