Date set for new car park at Wolverhampton hospital
A new £3.5 million car park will open for hundreds of patients at Wolverhampton's New Cross Hospital in May next year, bosses have announced.
The facility will become the latest addition to be developed at the city hospital in recent years and aims to ease pressure on the already-busy existing car parks.
Work on the project to create the single-storey car park extension at the Wolverhampton Road site will start in mid-to-late January and will take around 16 weeks to complete.
David Loughton, chief executive of the Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust that runs New Cross, said the project would go some way to meeting parking demands at the site.
He said: "It's never going to completely alleviate the problem as there will always be more cars needing parking spaces but it will go some way towards it."
But Councillor Milkinder Jaspal, deputy mayor of Wolverhampton and a Heath Town councillor, said while the single-storey car park would be welcomed, he did not think it would resolve the problem of people parking on surrounding streets.
He said: "I am going to be meeting with residents tomorrow because they are so annoyed.
"The clear problem is people are just refusing to pay and are resorting to parking nearby, which is a clear message. This is happening all day, every day," he said.
The hospital has been plagued by car parking problems for many years. Earlier this year charges were increased by 50 per cent to £2 an hour and free parking for disabled users was scrapped for the first time.
Mike Goodwin, head of estates development at the hospital, said the tender for the car park was out and that it would have between 100 and 250 spaces.