Pay and display parking is to be introduced across Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust’s sites from 20 June 2016. See here for up to date information.

Parking will still be free for blue badge holders, those working for free as Oxford Health volunteers, and assistance will be available for those on low incomes and/or benefits. We will also be offering cheaper long-term parking for those needing to attend frequent/daily appointments.

Oxford Health has not charged for parking up until this point. The decision to introduce pay and display machines has had to be made to improve the parking experience for visitors to our sites and ensure that people park safely.

Parking in and around the Trust has become increasingly problematic with more and more people bringing their cars onto our sites such that the numbers significantly exceed the spaces available.

Mike McEnaney, director responsible for estates and facilities, said: “Sadly people are parking their cars inappropriately and in ways that create a significant safety risk to our sites.

“Many of our estate locations are very old and not designed for the volume of traffic we are experiencing; therefore we have to take action to ensure we manage parking safely at our sites.

“Most importantly we need to prevent parking on pedestrian walkways, blocking of designated ambulance bays, emergency vehicle access and the inappropriate use of disabled parking bays.

“The safety of our patients, service users, staff and anyone else who needs to access our sites is a priority, and to do this we need make sure our parking facilities are maintained and supervised. The lack of space and finance means that increasing parking facilities is not an option.”

As part of the implementation of the pay and display parking across our sites, we will be engaging the services of a car park management company, who will be ensuring the new parking arrangements are implemented effectively. Penalty charge notices will be issued to those who continue to park in an unsafe way.

We have managed to minimise the charges and set them at a fair and reasonable rate and we have considered our patients and service users who visit our sites and included free parking for the first 30 minutes to allow for drop off.

The charges for parking across our sites will be as follows:

To ensure that the management of the car parking system is handled sensitively and with the needs of our patients and services users at the forefront, the Trust itself will be managing the appeals process for car parking charge notices in-house.

“This change to our car parking system brings us in line with the majority of other NHS trusts and we hope that people will recognise that it is being done to improve conditions for them,” said Mike.

“We feel that the introduction of car parking management will significantly reduce the number of unnecessary vehicles on site encouraging people to use alternative and greener forms of transport or lift share to site.”

For more information, please see our list of frequently asked questions and answers.