CHARGING staff to park their cars netted Great Western Hospital hundreds of thousands of pounds last year.

The NHS trust responsible for the Marlborough Road hospital received an income of £629,560 from staff parking charges and fines.

Nationally, unions have slammed the staff parking charges as scandalous. However, GWH bosses said all the income from car parks was ploughed back into improvements at the hospital.

New figures published by NHS Digital showed that GWH earned a total of £1.7m last year from parking charges levied on hospital visitors, patients and staff.

Of the four nearest hospital trusts, Oxford University Hospitals, Salisbury District Hospital and RUH in Bath, the Great Western received the most income from staff parking fees and fines.

A spokeswoman for the Great Western Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust said: “We are continuing to review and improve the space we provide for staff to park here at the Great Western Hospital and the income that’s generated from this service always goes back into the hospital in a number of ways including improved parking.”

Across England, NHS trusts made a combined total of almost £70m from charging staff to park at their sites in the 12 months to March 2018.

Unite, which represents around 100,000 health workers, criticised the sum as scandalous and a “tax on hard-pressed employees”.

Sarah Carpenter, national officer for health at Unite, said: "It is a scandal that NHS trusts in England have pocketed nearly £70m from staff car parking charges.

"Such a large figure will take a large chunk out of the gains in the current NHS pay package which saw most staff get a pay rise of 6.5% over the next three years.

"This pernicious trend is replicated by financially squeezed trusts across England - our members are being used as an extra income stream for these trusts.

"We would like a situation where dedicated NHS staff, who don't earn a fortune, don't have to pay to park their cars to go to work to look after the sick, the vulnerable and the injured 365 days a year."

British Medical Association council chair, Dr Chaand Nagpaul, added that it was unacceptable for hospitals to plug financial gaps by charging and imposing fines on staff.

A spokeswoman for regulator NHS Improvement said income generated was used to pay the costs of providing parking, while excess funds were put into clinical services.

Hospital parking charges were abolished in Wales earlier this year and have been largely abandoned in Scotland. They remain in England and Northern Ireland.