IT’S been called a tax on the sick, and it is. It’s also a tax on where you live – or rather, where you or your loved one end up in hospital.

Yes, it’s that old nutshell again – parking at hospitals. I’ve just been hit with a parking ticket for parking on double yellow lines at a hospital 60 miles from home. Serves you right, you might be thinking, and normally I wouldn’t disagree.

But this was a place where the car parks are clearly too small for the number of visitors because if they weren’t no one would park on the double yellow lines – and in some cases double reds – that snake ribbon-like along every single roadway in the hospital grounds. But park they do, absolutely everywhere, on not one, but both sides of the numerous access roads that thread their way round the complex.

And when you’re miles from home in a strange place anxiously trying to park up so you can visit someone who’s seriously ill, the last thing you want is to crawl endlessly round a car park trying to find a space that’s as rare as rocking horse doo-dahs.

I reckon it’s a cynical ploy by faceless bureaucrats far from the hospital bed front line to fleece money out of the vulnerable and distracted, whether they be patients, or the families and friends visiting them.

According to one set of figures hospitals have pocketed more than £1 billion over a decade from patients, relatives and staff, with drivers now coughing up more than £160 million a year in parking fees. A quarter of hospital trusts are raking in at least £1 million in charges with some money-grabbing trusts pulling in nearly £4 million.

But surprise, surprise, the Department of Health has now stopped collating these figures centrally, probably because of an edict from a politically-aware minister that knows they’re on a sticky wicket for essentially endorsing such charges by association… For England is the only country in our union that charges parking fees at hospitals. Wales and Scotland outlawed the practice five years and clearly we’re being very slow to follow suit.

And if being taken poorly in England isn’t bad enough in terms of your pocket and those of your family and friends, where you fall ill means your purse will be hurt harder in some places than others. Even in Yorkshire….

A quick canter round the websites of various major hospitals in our region shows a real disparity in parking charges – even within the same NHS trusts.

Take York, for instance. To park up at York Hospital costs you £2 for the first hour rising to £4 for a second hour. If you have the misfortune to be stuck at the hospital for five hours or more you can kiss goodbye to a whopping £11.50.

But if you end up at Scarborough Hospital – which is run by the same trust and like York has an accident and emergency department and offers up medical and surgical services including intensive care – you only get stung for £1.20 in the first hour, £2.50 for two hours and a measly £6 (compared to York) if you’re there more than five hours.

And if you fall ill or have an accident, make sure you pull away your oxygen mask long enough to tell the ambulance to keep you away from Leeds, because whether you’re taken to St James’s Hospital or Leeds General Infirmary your folks will have to cough up £8.30 if they sit by your bed more than five hours, and an eye-watering £16.40 if you’re on your deathbed and they remain at your side for 24 hours or more.

No, instead make sure the ambulance takes you to Airedale Hospital in Keighley because it’s only £3.50 to park there for up to 24 hours. Failing that, you could ask them to try the Friarage Hospital at Northallerton or the James Cook Hospital in Middlesbrough where the South Tees Hospital Trust will let you get away with just a fiver for day-long parking.

Administrators come out with mealy-mouthed reasons for charging – it funds maintenance of car parks, the provision of security staff (presumably there so they can slap parking tickets on miscreants’ cars) – but some trusts have broken ranks and abandoned charges all together.

Take Trafford Hospital in Manchester who have made parking free as fees were ‘an unnecessary stress, expense and hassle.’

Quite. For let’s be absolutely clear about this. Car parking charges at hospitals make a mockery of a National Health Service that’s supposed to be free at the point of need.

Founder Nye Bevan has probably spun so many times in his grave he’s cork-screwed.