THE recent appearance of the large sums of money collected for hospital parking leads me to relate a recent experience at Wythenshawe Hospital.

Mid December, my son and I were visiting my wife in hospital.

We went to one of the car parks, complete with barrier and ticket issuer, which said "spaces".

This car park consisted of a surface rather like a building site, with large potholes full of water.

Consequently, cars were parked randomly, to avoid the potholes, so there were actually no spaces for parking as there were no markings for spaces.

It seems, therefore, that the money taken is not fed back into the system, but will, no doubt, finance a "car parking executive" and hierarchy.

There was no local pay point at that park, and when we found the pay point, it took only coins, and not cards: this might be all right if the charges were low but at a £3 minimum, one would have expected a more up to date machine.

Far better would be to dispense with the machine, and pay someone, out of the £2million takings, to sit in an office, and take payment: it is quite clear that the money is not spent on maintenance.

There also seemed to be haphazard parking outside the designated car parks: do Wythenshawe not use some of the money to pay parking attendants to control this?

I have no objection to making a reasonable payment to park, but the money collected should be used to organize the parking into a proper system.

David Olliver
Altrincham