Disabled parking / hospitals

mr_rush

Hello all

My local hospital has very few disabled bays.

Several patients tell me they end up paying for parking.

By the time they finish their appointment, blood test, pharmacy, nearly half a day is taken up - and obviously expensive.

Can I just tell them to park in any spot & ignore the invoices that come through the post?

give_them_FA

In a word- yes. They could leave any blue badge on the car even though its not legal on private ground. If disabled parking is free then writing to the hospital administration should see any charge cancelled; or, as you say, simply ignore if thats too much trouble.

Don't waste time writing to the parking parasite though.

Half_way

This is a link to a blue badge http://www.freevector.com/blue-badge/
maybe you could display something like that instead?

Coupon-mad

mr_rush wrote: »

Hello all

My local hospital has very few disabled bays.

Several patients tell me they end up paying for parking.

By the time they finish their appointment, blood test, pharmacy, nearly half a day is taken up - and obviously expensive.

Can I just tell them to park in any spot & ignore the invoices that come through the post?

Yes.

But to get things changed the local disability advocacy service or local AgeUK should lobby for more disabled bays. So tell people to complain to them and ask for representation at a meeting with the hospital management. It's a breach of the Equality Act 2010 not to provide sufficient 'reasonable adjustments' unless the hospital can show it's not possible to provide more (difficult to wriggle out of if there's a whole car park...).

Service providers are also legally obliged to check that they are continuing to meet the needs of the disabled service-users, by still providing sufficient adjustments such as disabled bays. So if 10 disabled bays was considered enough when they were painted, years ago, they cannot just assume that's still OK now. There are big clues which they should be picking up on when they 'should be' reviewing this provision. If those bays are always full in appointment hours, and perhaps patients are arriving late due to not being able to park, or getting fake PCNs and are complaining about it, then the clues are there that it's an insufficient provision.

Therefore a breach of disability law and leaving themselves open to being sued in fact. Also disabled people should not pay the same amount for the same parking time, in a P&D car park anyway (whether Council or private). Norwich Council learned the hard way that to charge the same money is actually discriminatory, because disabled people generally need longer to do the same things.