Airport parking costs THREE times as much in Britain - is it need or greed?

Car-park charges in the UK are enough to drive any motorist insane - and the rip-off boys are getting greedier and greedier. Particularly those who have a captive audience.

Like airports.

I returned to Spain last week after a three-week trip to Manchester knowing I'd be flying into Alicante's new state-of-the-art terminal, an amazing edifice which cost the cash-strapped Spanish well over £500 million in English money.

To be precise, he Madrid government invested €628.67 million on expansion works which will double the airport's capacity and cater for up to 20 million passengers per year.

When my daughter Lisa met me on my arrival in Manchester, she paid a whopping £12 to leave her car in the Terminal One car-park for two hours. (well, I forked out the money, actually - that's what parents are for after all).

RIP-OFF. Manchester Airport car-park rates

Fortunately Lisa didn't get carried away with emotion and hug me for an hour when we said our goodbyes last week or another £8 would have been clamped into the jaws of Manchester's money monster.

Instead, she just dropped me off and vamoosed, leaving me to discover my flight was being delayed for well over an hour for technical reasons.

We eventually arrived at Alicante half an hour late and by the time I plonked myself down in my friend Valerie's car, it had been parked in the airport's new 2,700-space multi-storey facility for an hour and a half.

At Manchester prices, that would have meant a fee of £8 just to pick up a passenger who had already paid a fistful in airport taxes as part of her air fare.

In the event, Val's 1 hour 38 minute stay cost me 2 euros and 95 cents. That's less than one-third of Manchester's rip-off tariff - at an airport whose owners must be desperate to recoup its massive investment as quickly as possible.

Exactly the same charge, based on a minute-by-minute reading which equates to just 70 centimos for the first half an hour, is levied at other major Spanish airports, including Madrid's main Barajas facility, Malaga, Barcelona and Valencia.

How refreshing that a nation in desperate financial straits should put the passenger before profit, unlike the greedy '' fleece 'em for as much as we can'' attitude in the UK.

Alicante's massive  new terminal cost a cool €628.67

When my sister flew to Manchester from her home in the Middle East recently, fellow passengers on a delayed Jet2.com flight consoled her by insisting the plane was ALWAYS late in order to ensure that family and friends had to park up for at least an hour and incur that obligatory £8 fee.

I understand that Stansted charge similar prices to Manchester, whilst Heathrow's initial £2.50 charge goes up to £4.30 after just half an hour (or at least it used to, though it may well have increased since those figures were reported).

Perhaps that's why Spain is in a worse economic pickle than Britain...the Zapatero government prefer to remain needy rather than labelled as greedy.

So carry on with the overcharging, Britain. Enjoy squeezing the public to the pip.

I'll continue to chill out on the cheap here on the Costa Lot-less.

England’s hospital car-park scam is beyond a sick joke

Hospital stays: My granddaughter Daisy

Last summer I spent four days in Elche Hospital as a guest of the Spanish health service – and my only complaint was that the food was inedible. I bet you’d also cringe at the thought of a salad or bowl of clear soup devoid of a single grain of salt.

I’ve sucked tastier water from a dishcloth than the ultra-bland consommé the nurse plonked in front of me as an aperitif to my menial first meal as a patient.

There was method in that Friday afternoon madness, of course. Because I was in a coronary ward and I do have angina. But even my acutely health-conscious daughter has been unable to convince me that I’m shortening my life by going condimental before I tuck in. I do make one concession to the medical experts, mind you – I NEVER put salt on my dessert.

In the event, I was discharged from hospital the following Monday three kilos lighter after passing my medical tests with flying blood pressure (another abysmal Donna attempt at humour – my BP was actually normal, thanks to the medication I’ve been taking for the past five years). I couldn’t wait for my first taste of freedom and dreamt of ending my enforced diet with a portion of salt- and-pepper ribs and a salt-beef sandwich. Maybe with a packet of liquorice ‘all-salts’ for afters.

But I digress. This article is not meant to be a complaint about Spanish hospitals – or the heartless way they feed their cardiac patients. There was certainly precious little else I could moan about as a patient at Elche. A cosy two-bed ward, caring nurses, highly efficient doctors, caring nurses and four days of intensive Spanish lessons for free.

Last but not least, my friends were not charged a single centimo to come and visit me. And from what I can gather from friends on expatforum.com the same free-parking policy operates at Spanish hospitals  from Malaga to Lorca and from Denia to Villajoyosa.

How different to the money-grabbing English system of ripping off the motorist at every opportunity. Particularly at hospitals and, even more so, airports (which I’ll get to in a future article).

My 11-year-old granddaughter Daisy suffers from Crohn’s Disease and has spent quite a bit of time at Manchester’s ultra-modern Royal Children’s Hospital this past couple of years. The kindly local NHS Trust have a voucher system that allows close relatives to visit sick children to use the vast multi-storey car park at a special daily rate of £5.

That’s £35 a week to spend time with your own kids when they need you most. How generous!

And don’t tell me the money all goes to improve the NHS. In a country where every working person pays an ever-increasing National Insurance contribution, surely NO-ONE should have to pay to visit a suffering relative.

Scotland and Wales abolished hospital parking charges a couple of years ago – so what’s so different about England? The authorities are just greedier to make bigger profits, that’s all.

As my daughter Hayley Beckman (Daisy’s mother) says: ‘‘The new hospital is very modern but it’s difficult to get to compared to the two children’s hospitals it replaced, and much more expensive to park.

‘‘It’s absolutely disgraceful that parents have to pay to spend time with their sick children in hospital.’’

It’s not as if Manchester Children's University Hospital NHS Trust is in dire financial straits. Indeed, a Daily Mirror investigation established that in 2007, the Trust made a profit of £1,338,694. And 218 hospitals around the country made a staggering £24,993,855 the same year - just by charging their own staff to park their cars.

At the time, Juliet Dunmur, chair of the British Medical Association Patient Liaison Group, said: ‘‘The car-parking fees charged by some NHS trusts are unacceptable. It amounts to a tax on vulnerable patients and on NHS staff.’’

And hospital visiting is an increasingly-expensive experience. Recent research by the Action for Sick Children charity revealed that parking for families of children now costs £1.75 an hour on average.

It’s bad enough in Manchester, but at two London hospitals the parking tariff works out at an unbelievable £386.40 a week because there are no discounts for long-term stays.

At many hospitals, it’s not just visitors who get stung. Nurses working at Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital must pay £20 for a weekly car-park pass – or leave their cars a mile or more away.

Still, there is a consolation. With all that enforced walking, they can afford to pour oodles of salt on their food and never worry about getting a dicky heart.