We now know that the new £39.2million multi-storey car park at Watford General Hospital will provide 1,290 spaces for staff, patient and visitor use and that in the short term the present essential staff car park will continue to offer 404 spaces. However both West Herts Hospital Trust’s recent information sheet and their architect’s three presentations indicate that it is intended to phase out the latter facility.

In the long term, therefore, only 1,290 spaces may be available for all users and yet West Herts Hospitals Trust’s parking consultant, Odyssey, has consistently asserted that it is working on an, admittedly worst-case, assumption of a future 20 per cent increase in hospital visits as the population grows and ages.

The trust’s information sheet further admits that as building work progresses in the shorter term, the 404 capacity is likely to be reduced.

Thus it seems most probable from the above that parking facilities will prove inadequate to meet demand.

I have now written four times to the trust on this issue and have yet to receive a reply from a body which supposedly prides itself on its public engagement. I have also listened to three presentations from the architects who continue to cite current parking capacity as 1,750 and admit that the new arrangements will result in a reduction in parking. By complete contrast, the trust's recent information sheet implies a present capacity of 1,611, which allows them to claim that there will be an increase of 83 spaces, at least in the very short term.

Who is telling the truth? Or does no-one know how many parking spaces there are at present?

If that is the case, it does not augur well for the prospects of successfully constructing an 18-storey hospital on a cramped site while continuing to provide safe treatment to a catchment area of 500,000 residents who have long deserved much better from their healthcare providers.

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