02 February 2023 , 21:28
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Rishi Sunak refused to commit to giving nurses free hospital parking - as he tried to repeatedly dodge the issue in an interview with Piers Morgan.
The Prime Minister was tackled over dedicated NHS staff being forced to pay to park their cars when they go to work.
Pressed on the issue, Mr Sunak repeatedly tried to dodge the question by saying: "There's other things that we've done for nurses as well."
As he fumbled to find excuses, he said: "Everyone watching this show will get to work in lots of different ways."
The PM also claimed it was "not fair" to compare to Scotland and Wales, where nurses don't pay parking charges at hospitals.
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The interview comes as Rishi Sunak marks 100 days in No10Piers said it was "preposterous" nurses are paying £1000 each a year to park their car "outside a place that they're going in to save lives".
After a painful back and forth, Piers asked him to "at least look at" the issue, Mr Sunak eventually pledged: “Of course I’m happy to look at that.”
The Mirror has campaigned since 2017 for hospital car parking charges to be abolished for everyone - patients, staff and visitors.
The NHS is facing strikes every day next week except for Wednesday in an ongoing pay dispute. Paramedics and nurses will both down tools on February 6 for the first time.
Mr Sunak said that failing to give nurses a pay rise matching inflation was “tough”, but added: “It’s about choices.”
The interview with the former Mirror editor comes as Mr Sunak marks 100 days in No10 after succeeding disaster PM Liz Truss, who he lost to in the Tory summer leadership race.
Mr Sunak confessed to Piers he feared his frontline political career was finished after he lost the Tory summer leadership race to rival Liz Truss.
Piers Morgan said it was 'preposterous' nurses had to pay expensive car parking charges outside hospitals“I’m very devoted to my constituents at home in North Yorkshire, in Richmond, so I hadn’t considered leaving politics altogether, but I had obviously assumed that my career in frontline politics had come to an end,” said the former Chancellor.
“When I resigned as Chancellor… I resigned thinking and believing that would probably then be the last senior job I had in politics.”
Mr Sunak also vowed to release his tax returns "shortly" as he battles to recover from sacking sack MP Nadhim Zahawi as Tory Party chairman over his financial affairs.
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The PM, a former Goldman Sachs banker worth an estimated £730million with his heiress wife Akshata Murty, pointed to HM Revenue and Customs’ end-of-January deadline for filing tax returns for the delay in revealing his.
He insisted: "They will be published shortly.
“As you know the tax filing deadline was just a few days ago, so that's why.
"So we do the tax-filing deadlines just passed, so they're just being prepared and they will be released shortly."