Sunak: Fear for my girls walking alone makes me want more in jail
RISHI Sunak wants more criminals to be locked up, revealing that he fears for the safety of his daughters on the streets.
The Prime Minister said that before recent high- profile cases, he had ‘ taken for granted’ the safety of women and girls walking alone.
He renewed a pledge to create thousands more prison places so more criminals can be jailed to make the streets safer.
Asked if he felt the number of people in jail was high enough, he said: ‘I want to reduce crime and that means I want to make sure that we catch criminals.
‘A logical consequence of catching more criminals is going to be part of that [more in prison].
‘If you put more police officers on the street and you tackle more crime, you’re going to end up with more people in jail.’
He said 15,000 more police officers were already on the streets after the Tories promised another 20,000 in their 2019 manifesto – a target ‘I remain committed to’.
The Prime Minister has two daughters, one of whom is reaching her teens, and he wants to ensure that they ‘and everyone else can walk around safely’.
He said cases like that of Sarah Everard – the Londoner raped and murdered by police officer Wayne Couzens – showed more needed to be done to put offenders behind bars. It later emerged that Couzens had exposed himself to people before the murder. The Prime Minister said crime was coming down but he believed more of those caught should be behind bars.
He told reporters at the G20 summit this week: ‘My eldest is at the age where she’s starting to walk to places by herself or is wanting to… It brings it home to you as a parent.’
He also referred to the ‘awful’ case of nine-year- old Olivia Pratt-Korbel, shot dead in her home in Liverpool in August.
‘I want to make sure that my kids and everyone else can walk around safely,’ he said. ‘That’s what any parent wants for their children. It’s what anyone wants for their… wife or their sister as well.
‘In the past I’ve taken it for granted, and many of us as men have, and… the events of the last year showed us that so many women and girls, actually for a while, have not felt as safe as they should.
‘We should charge more people and reduce crime and have them in jail.’
The latest Crime Survey for England and Wales showed that in the year to June, crime was down 8 per cent compared with the pre-pandemic 12month period to March 2020.
The Government aims to create 20,000 new prison places by the mid-2020s.
‘It brings it home to you as a parent’