The Scottish government ban on hospital parking charges came into effect on the 1st of January leaving England the only part of the UK where everyone has to pay to park on hospital car parks.

Hospital car parks have been free to use in Wales since April and in Northern Ireland, chronically ill patients and their visitors were also expempted from parking charges last year.  Now Scotland has joined them by abolishing parking charges in all but three hospitals north of the border where the car parks are covered by a PFI agreement.

The cost of being ill in England is increasing year on year thanks to the indifference of the British government to the needs of the English while the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish governments look after their own people.  The price of prescriptions is rising every year in England but in Wales they are free, in Scotland they will be free this year and in Northern Ireland they will be free from next year.

A spokesman for the British Department of Health said that abolishing parking charges in England wouldn’t be a “sensible use” of limited NHS resources yet in December the NHS in England reported a budget surplus of £2.1bn for the 2007-08 financial year.  That’s £2.1bn of profit made by the NHS in England from charging cancer patients for life-saving medication and charging relatives of terminally ill patients to park when they visit their loved ones in hospital.  The NHS in England raises £430m a year in prescription charges.

What the accountants, managers and consultants at the British Department of Health think is a “sensible use” of English taxes isn’t necessarily (or often) what the English taxpayer thinks their money should be spent on and what most of us think is not a “sensible use” of our taxes is subsidising hospital car parking and prescriptions in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland while we still have to pay ourselves.