Rishi Sunak has spoken of his commitment to putting more police officers on the streets and the need to tackle violence against women following the tragic death of a Northumberland teenager.
The Prime Minister made the comments during a visit to the North East on Monday morning, where he was highlighting the Government's healthcare initiative, which touched on subjects of waiting times and pay for nurses. And when told of the tragic death of 15-year-old Holly Newton, who was an alleged victim of a stabbing in Hexham, Mr Sunak said his "heart goes out" to the teen's family.
"My heart goes out to them, that's tragic", he said at the event in Darlington; "I have two young kids and I can't imagine my kids or any young person losing their life in that way. It's awful. What can we do to stop that happening? It's a combination of things.
"It's about bringing more police officers on the street, and that's part of our bigger commitment to having 20,000 more officers across the country."
Read more: First picture of Hexham 'stabbing' victim, 15, as police charge boy, 16, with murder
He continued: "There will be more officers on the streets in the North East. It's also about giving the police the powers they need, when it comes to knife crime, stop and search is quite an important tool the police have to prevent knife crime from happening. We as a Government changed our rules around that making it easier for the police to use stop and search.
"The last thing, which is really important to me, as I have two young girls, is in particular we need to do a better job of preventing violence against women and girls. For far too long, too many women and too many girls haven't felt as safe as they need to be and we've got to do a better job of that."
Mr Sunak said that other improvements made to street lighting and CCTV in communities would also help prevent violent crimes by making people feel safer when walking at night. He added: "I think we are making progress and things have been moving in the right direction, but this tragedy shows us that we've got work to do."
During the event, Mr Sunak was also asked about the ongoing issues with NHS pay, and in particular, nurses. Asked when and how the NHS dispute over pay would be resolved, Sunak said: "I've got enormous gratitude for all of you who are doing a tremendous job win the NHS, particularly this winter, which has been very challenging because of the reasons we're talking about, and that's come on the back of two years which have been really challenging with Covid.
"What does that mean for pay? Nothing would give me more pleasure than to wave a magic wand and have all of you paid lots more, of course we do, who wouldn't want that.
"There's an independent process that goes through this and provides recommendations to the Government, so it wasn't our decision, an independent process takes evidence from the unions, from the Government and others and says 'look, we think the appropriate pay level, pay increase is X', they said roughly five per cent so we said fine, we'll accept that, that's what we put in place for last year."
Mr Sunak added that there were many factors that the Government has to balance, saying: "I can tell you, hand on heart that there's more money going into the NHS and social care than there ever has been before. I can tell you that when we had to make difficult decisions last year, we went out of our way to protect the NHS and social care and give it even more."
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