THE COMPANY in charge of the car park in Ninewells Hospital, Dundee, is refusing to disclose how much money it has made from the site.

Last week, health chiefs in Grampian revealed visitors and staff paid nearly £3.5 million for parking at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary over the last three years.

It costs £500,000 a year to run the car park, leaving NHS Grampian with a clear profit of £2m over the three-year period.

Parts of the ARI car park are managed by Vinci Park, the same company that is in charge of Ninewells car park. However, unlike in Aberdeen, any profits from the Ninewells car park go to Vinci Park, not the NHS.

It was nearly 10 years ago that NHS Tayside was forced to mortgage away its own car park to ease congestion problems.

This means that NHS Tayside does not know how much has been spent on parking at the hospital since 1998, or how much of that represents clear profit for operator Vinci Park.

When the NHS ran the car park it did so on a non-profit basis.

The closure of Dundee Royal Infirmary and transfer of services from Kings Cross meant a new multi-storey car park had to be built at the hospital.

This was financed through a public finance initiative—where private companies build public buildings and lease them back to the public period over a set period.

“Prior to the private contract we didn’t have any profit,” said Ninewells site manager Brian Main. “The charges we had were only to recover the cost.”

“At the time the new car park was built the government preferred PFI, and that’s why the multi-storey was built that way.”

Mr Main said he was “gobsmacked” when he heard nearly £3.5m had been spent on parking at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary over the past three years.

PFI projects allow cash-strapped public bodies to construct new buildings without having to pay millions of pounds up front.

However, their repayments—over decades not years—will eventually add up to far more than the original cost of construction.

Italian firm Impregilo Parking Ltd, a subsidiary of Fiat, put up the £3.5m to build the new car park in return for the right to run Ninewells car park as its own business for 30 years.

It immediately raised the price of parking.

Spaces that had been free suddenly cost drivers 50p, while spaces that had a 60p charge rose to £1.

Future price increases were pegged to inflation, but the company soon began introducing further increases—due, it said, to “heavy rates” imposed on the new multi-storey car park.

In 2002 Vinci Park took control of the lease after paying £6.8 million to Impregilo for the Ninewells site and another in Cardiff.

Standard parking at Ninewells costs patients and visitors £1.60 if they leave within four hours, but in some cases charges can rise as high as £10 for an extended stay.

There are still more than 20 years before Vinci Park’s lease on the car park at Ninewells runs out.

A spokeswoman for Vinci said it would not disclose how much had been spent on parking since it took over the Ninewells car park or how much profit it had made from the site.