Readers Letters: It's time to make more parking spaces at our hospitals

I have witnessed dangerous driving, aggressive language and even physical damage. Few of those involved appeared naturally combative; they were frustrated, anxious or desperate because they were late for appointments. We have experienced waits of up to 30 minutes to find a space, and the pressure of trying to meet an appointment time can be overwhelming.

Many hospital car parks were designed more than 20 years ago, when traffic volumes and hospital attendance were lower. Unless they are upgraded to reflect today’s demand, the result will continue to be chaos.

Limiting hospital parking to encourage public transport seems to have had limited success where public transport has not increased in frequency or become more affordable. People still need to travel to hospitals, often from considerable distances.

Hospitals also have the added problem of staff parking. It seems unreasonable that people working in hospitals can struggle to park at their workplace. Some hospitals even restrict access to car parks before 9am to prevent staff using spaces intended for patients.

Surely there is a practical solution. With limited development land, the answer may have to be vertical: multi-storey or single-deck parking. An existing ground-level car park accommodating 500 cars could potentially become 1,000 spaces. There would be cost and disruption, but without examining the possibilities, nothing will change.

Even if such a project cost £10 million, perhaps a modest charge could help fund it. A nominal £1 charge per entry, generating around £2,000 a day, could produce £500-£600,000 in revenue annually.

The creation of a trust could help deal with additional burden of profits. The payback period would be long but it would be one solution to the problem.

What is needed now is a serious, realistic examination of the options and the source of funding required to deliver them.

Graham Montgomery, Paisley

Welcome move

The proposal to house illegal immigrants in middle class areas is long overdue. Had this been the rule from Day One the greater resources and sharper elbows of middle Britain would have seen to it the boats, large and small, never left France.

I hope that every MP soon finds next door occupied by these travellers from afar.

Tim Flinn, Edinburgh

Waste of time

It was a thoroughly refreshing change to read Malcolm Parkin's letter (“Brave new world”, 20 August). He eloquently lists some of the industrial and social declines that have been driven by political ideologies which have reduced our once proudly industrious nation to its current state of penury.

The UK economy has been indeed been sadly reduced to little more than a service industry as it imagines that it is leading the world on what is a ruinously costly mission to net zero while we run up a growing trade deficit with countries such as China, currently standing at an all time high of £18.3 billion. Their myriad electrical goods, EVs, solar panels, wind turbine components – to name but a few – have cornered the world market at an environmental and human cost that is largely hidden from our eyes as politicians misleadingly inform us that our greenhouse gas emissions have been reduced by 54 per cent over 1990 levels.

It is often conveniently unstated that this apparently impressive figure refers to what are called “territorial emissions” but when the carbon footprint of imports is taken into account it is reduced to around 24 per cent.

For a country that accounts for less than 1 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions this much-trumpeted achievement may reduce so-called global warming by a minute fraction of a degree.

Is the rest of the world going to sacrifice its economic prosperity and the wellbeing of its citizens at the false altar of net zero?

Neil J Bryce, Gateshaw, Kelso, Scottish Borders

Cut the waste

Raising taxes is an admission of failure (“Edinburgh set for roll out of 300% tax on second homes”, 20 August). No society thrives on a diet of ever-increasing taxation, quite the reverse.

Why is it that the more politicians get paid, the less is their productive output? Edinburgh politicians dislike cars with their anti-car measures, they dislike tourists with the tourist tax and now they are turning on their own residents.

Second homes are obviously not really required but when a society deems that this is a “crime” while real crime is often ignored, then society is on the edge of the abyss. There was little justification for doubling council tax in Edinburgh for owning a second home, but to increase it again by such a large amount is shocking. No-one likes taxes that are unfair, especially with the frittering away of taxpayers’ money reported regularly.

There is absolutely no justification for this new level of taxation. Cut the waste instead, perhaps starting with the pay packets of the politicians.

Gerald Edwards, Glasgow

Pounds of flesh

In Scotland It appears that the SNP government is hell bent on squeezing the last penny out of taxpayers, with particular regard to those fortunate enough to have incomes within the higher tax brackets.

A perusal of the HM Revenue and Customs website demonstrates that these high-paid individuals (a number of whom are employed by local and national governments) who fall into the higher tax brackets contribute approximately 68 per cent of income tax paid to the government. Those on the lower intermediate tax rate contribute 24 per cent, with the remaining basic and starter rates contributing the remaining 8 per cent.

Total income tax collection annually is some £18.6 billion, which is approximately 20 per cent of the total public sector revenue of £98.3bn.

On that basis, and realising that 80 per cent of revenue raised is raised by other sources (although Joe Public generally funds this directly through VAT etc or indirectly through business or household rates etc), the idea that lower income brackets still have money taken from their pockets does appear to be government extracting every piece of their pound of flesh, as it were.

A suggestion that minor adjustments elsewhere in the tax system could cover revenue foregone from the poorest in society if removed from paying tax appears eminently doable and this, in addition of course, would mean those with below poverty income levels would have a minor increase in their available income.

Just a suggestion, of course.

A Lewis, West Linton, Scottish Borders

Silly season

It may be because it’s August – what the media likes to call the “silly season” – that we read Grant Frazer's strange letter (18 August). I say “strange” because it has no connection with reality. He claims that “the people of Scotland [are] continuing to seek self-determination”.

He knows full well that that is a total fabrication. In the recent Scottish election, in 18 seats, fewer than half the electorate even bothered turning out to vote, they had so little interest in devolution.

Out of a total Scottish electorate of about 4,000,000, only 952,296 people bothered to vote for the SNP or any other extremist, separatist party. By comparison, 1,335,850 voted for parties who support the Union. That majority is almost exactly the same as the majority at the 2014 referendum and on a much smaller turnout, showing that the Union is, if anything, even more popular than 12 years ago!

Mr Frazer then makes further absurd statements such as “independence is the direct will of the people”. Self-evidently, it is not. Demonstrating his lack of knowledge about the basic character of Scotland, which its history clearly shows, he claims we are a “sovereign Celtic nation”.

No, Sovereignty is a matter for the Parliament of the UK alone. The Scottish people, moreover, are not “Celtic”, but a mixture of various peoples, from Beaker Folk to Picts, Britons, Gaels, Vikings and Angles. Add in Normans and Flemish and you end up with what I call “Heinz 57”, which is the best way to describe us Scots, just as it is for the English, our closest relatives.

Andrew HN Gray, Edinburgh

Cunning critters

Midges are cunning. Yes, they may start being very local (Steven Scott Taylor (Letters, 20 August), but they can find distant hosts to bite by detecting the plumes of carbon dioxide they exhale and flying along them to their source.

Midges are a brilliant example of the international nature of science. Some species have Scottish names, like duddingstoni and scoticus, but the one associated with the Highland Fling was named impunctatus by the Belgian entomologist Maurice Goetghebuer.

When bluetongue first appeared in northern Europe in 2006 and eastern England in 2007 interest in midges, transmitter of the disease, surged, as did demand for copies of the standard guide of British species published by the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1960.

Its co-author was the Etonian and Cambridge graduate Edward Pelham-Clinton, deputy keeper of entomology at the Royal Scottish Museum, who became the tenth Duke of Newcastle five weeks before he died in 1988.

Hugh Pennington, Aberdeen

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