Otley'S Lord Mayor of Leeds is calling for the abolition of car parking charges at Wharfedale General Hospital.

Coun Graham Kirkland (Lib Dem, Otley and Wharfedale) has called for the charges to be dropped before visitors to the hospital are involved in an accident after parking on the main road outside the site.

He said: "These parking charges will only raise a few pounds for the hospital, they may cost more to collect. But they are already having one effect: visitors to the hospital are parking outside on the main road, instead of in the car park.

"Newall Carr Road is used by at least 100 'Quarry' lorries every day. Heavily loaded, they frequently travel at high speed along that stretch of road, and they are not designed to stop in a hurry!

"The road outside the hospital is quite narrow and it will be ridiculous if the NHS has to lay out thousands of pounds in treating the victim of a road accident which will have been effectively caused by driving hospital visitors out of the relatively safe environs of the hospital car park to a far more dangerous road side."

But a spokesman for the Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust said that although it urged people not to park on the road and outside people's houses, it would be unfair if car park users at the hospital were not charged.

He said: "We do understand Councillor Kirkland's concerns and, indeed, we are speaking to both the police and the local authority to make sure that the matter is dealt with in the most appropriate way.

"But in terms of people actually putting themselves at risk from parking on the road, we would certainly urge people not to park on the road and feel that the level of charge for parking at the hospital, which is 50p for two hours, is not unreasonable.

"We don't think that there is any need for people who have use of a car to park on the road. It is something that has been introduced to all of the hospitals in the trust. If Wharfedale was exempted from it, it would be a little unfair on the people in other hospitals."

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