Editorial: ​Free hospital car parking cannot be a priority in a time of extreme NHS funding pressure

​The campaign to end car parking charges at hospitals in Northern Ireland sounds superficially attractive.

It would mean people visiting patients in hospital would not have to worry about paying each time they see their loved one.

The problems appear when you think of alternative set-ups.

Consider the car park at Belfast City Hospital. As recently as the early 1990s the main car parking area outside the building was a single-level space in front of the tower block. Over a relatively short space of time that has become a three-level car park, in addition to a multi-storey car park to the side. Or consider the car parking at the Ulster Hospital: it too now has a large, multi-storey car park to the side, as well as three other open car parks for the public, yet even then there is a queue to get into the most sought after car park, to the front.

As is clear, the demand to park at the hospitals is vast, provision has been massively expanded, and it is still a struggle to manage the numbers. What would abolition do? It certainly would not make parking any easier.

In any event, the charges are nowhere near as expensive as parking in Belfast city centre, where people who work have to park for an entire day, year round – at hospitals it might be less than an hour, for weeks at a time.

And what would this do for public transport? Some of the parties of the political left who are most keen on abolishing – Sinn Fein have led the campaign – are also big advocates of public transport, some of them scolds indeed. But we have already made such transport easier, including a train station at the City Hospital and a Glider connecting the Ulster to the Royal, and to a park and ride?

Amid financial populism at Stormont, it is good that Diane Dodds MLA of the DUP has said that free car parking is the ideal but cannot be a priority in a time of extreme NHS funding pressure.