Pay and dismay

EXCLUSIVE: Hospitals hike parking charges
Trusts defy Hunt’s pledge
One ups fee to £8 a visit

MORE than 100 NHS trusts have shamelessly increased rip-off hospital car park charges despite government orders, figures revealed last night.

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt last year vowed to crack down on hospitals charging visitors sky-high rates.

But we can reveal that 112 trusts squeezed even more out of visitors in 2014/15.

Hospitals raising charges were adding “insult to injury”, campaigners raged.

Lobby group Carers UK revealed that Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London now charges £40 for a 24-hour stay — up from £30.

Medway Maritime Hospital in Gillingham, Kent, is hiking prices for a five-hour stay from £5 to £8 — a staggering 60 per cent increase.

Others include Wye Valley NHS Trust, Hertfordshire Partnership and Leeds and York Partnership.

Richard Lloyd, executive director of Which?, said: “This adds insult to injury. Tougher action is needed.”

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National Health Disservice

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Stats show that a third of hospitals in England now charge for parking, double that of a decade ago.

Among those Trusts that charge, 63 per cent — 112 — put them up in 2014/15, according to figures released by the Health & Social Care Information Centre.

Labour MP Julie Cooper said: “I am appalled that many trusts increased car parking charges.”

Insiders say the Government is scared of axing them as they make the NHS up to £200million a year. Health Minister Ben Gummer said: “We want the rules stuck to.”

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SOS to foreign nurses

Rule change . . . May lifts restrictions to save the NHS from staffing shortage Getty Images

HUNDREDS of nurses from the Philippines to Pakistan will fly into Britain next month to save the NHS from a winter staffing crisis.

Immigration rules were ripped up yesterday to temporarily lift restrictions on non-EU foreign nurses.

The Department of Health said it was vital following a crackdown on the use of “rip-off” staffing agencies.

Home Secretary Theresa May said nurses would be added to the Government’s Shortage Occupation List

— a register of jobs which cannot be filled by UK residents.

Foreign nurses will get priority when it comes to which non-EU workers are given UK work visas.

There is an annual cap of 20,700 on all skilled professions.

Thousands of foreign nurses who faced deportation in 2016 will now be allowed to stay.

It comes just months after the Government’s immigration advisers recommended against adding nurses to the occupation shortlist.

Ministers insisted they were doing all they could to recruit home-grown nurses.