The investigation into car parking charges at Good Hope Hospital has changed approach after a Freedom of Information request revealed that the hospital spent £1.2m in 2008/09 on car parking.The response, from Heart of England NHS Trust, suggested that the hospital was making a consistent loss of £140-280,000 every year despite income from parking charges increasing by 20% for each of the years where data was provided.The investigation is now looking for a volunteer to...

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The investigation into 'How much does Good Hope Hospital make from parking charges?' has linked to a spreadsheet of parking revenue from all UK hospitals (the data was gathered by the Liberal Democrats).This data shows the revenue split between customer and staff parking, but is lacking other information which would be useful in contextualising it - e.g number of staff and customers. It answers the original question but raises many more, such as: who is charging...

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UPDATE: Neil Houston has now completed 222 requests and is reviewing the list to see who else needs a request.The investigation into Which councils issue the most parking tickets per head of population? has been steadily sending Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to half of the councils in the UK - on Monday we passed 100. Although there are around 430 local councils in the UK, it is the 190 of those which have civil enforcement...

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Following the successful investigation into parking tickets in Birmingham, I thought it would be good to know how councils nationally perform in this area - who is the best and worst for parking?I set up an investigation asking just that question, hoping to build on what we'd learned from the Birmingham investigation.Thanks in no small part to Neil, this investigation is progressing along nicely, and we've learned some interesting stuff along the way. Neil has written the story so far on his blog. Here's a taster. "Under the Traffic Management Act 2004 a local authority (i.e council) could request/apply to take up the right for civil enforcement of parking contraventions [historically the police had the power, and contraventions were a criminal act] "Councils have been issued guidelines for levels of charges – including meaning of the ‘contraventions’, this also covers off fees for vehicle removal, storage, release of immobilization devices etc.  As well as the reasons for being able to issue tickets." See his blog entry for more. 

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We are currently adding a new 'reports' area to the site so that you can find out about the progress being made on some of the investigations. First up will be the story emerging around hospital parking charges. More on that in the next update.

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