Case Study: Good Hope Hospital NHS Trust, Sutton Coldfield
 Denis Wilson is a great believer in acknowledging that any travel plan should accommodate the necessity of car travel, rather than addressing purely non-car solutions.
This was demonstrated in 2005 when we were asked by Sutton Coldfield’s Good Hope Hospital NHS Trust to provide a mid-term assessment of its 1999 Green Travel Plan. The brief threw up an additional challenge when we discovered that our assessment was to accompany the hospital’s planning application for a 350-space multi-storey car park.
On the face of it, our task might have proved to be a difficult one. On the one hand we had to show that the hospital’s senior management and staff remained completely committed to the sustainable principles and operational requirements of their existing travel plan; on the other, we had to make a robust case for a new facility that could only ever be used by car users.
What we had to do was convince the planning authority that car use is an important part of any travel plan and that it’s necessary to provide sufficient parking where car travel is essential and unavoidable.
We knew that the hospital had already had numerous complaints about overspill parking from local residents, so much so that it was generating a lot of interest from the local council. Also, the hospital was concerned that it was losing key staff and unable to attract new staff because there was no guarantee of a parking space. To compound this, our forecasts showed that the increase in demand for services in the future would put even more pressure on a parking resource that was already struggling to cope.
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