BBC News Reality Check

Asked at PMQs about failures in the probation service - which were highlighted in a report into the murder of Zara Aleena - Rishi Sunak pointed to an “increase in the number of senior probation officers”.

As of September 2022 – the latest data available – there were 1,309 senior probation officers in England and Wales. This was an increase of 85 on the previous year and more than double the number seen in 2015.

In total, there were 18,366 full-time staff members - with different levels of experience - working in the probation service. This has increased in recent years, but so have the numbers leaving.

In the year to September 2022, over 2,100 people had left the probation service. There were almost 2,000 probation officer posts unfilled.

Responding to a question about NHS pay, the prime minister said: “When it comes to the issue of pay we have accepted in full the independent recommendations of the pay review bodies.”

The government did indeed accept the recommendations in July 2022 to give all NHS workers a pay rise of roughly £1,400 this year, worth about 4%, on average, for nurses.

The report from the pay review body quoted the latest inflation figure of 9% for April and cited predictions that the figure would rise above 10%. It peaked at 11.1% in October.

But the body is not entirely independent. Its remit requires it to take into account the NHS budget for the next three years, for example.

You can read more about it here.

Keir Starmer challenged Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on the Conservatives’ record on the NHS during PMQs today, asking him whether the PM planned to get waiting lists down to “where they were before COVID - that's 4.6 million - or back to where Labour had them in 2010, almost half of that?”

Starmer is correct on those figures. About 2.4 million people were waiting for treatment from a consultant in April 2010 according to figures from NHS England.

That rose to 4.6 million by February 2020, just before the pandemic and now stands at 7.2 million, with record numbers waiting more than a year.

A portion of the rise over the last decade will be due to our growing and aging population: for example there were 17% more people aged over 75 in 2019 than in 2010.

But performance has worsened over a range of measures since 2010, as funding for the NHS has been squeezed (something that Labour also signed up to in the 2010 election).

You can read more about what's happened to NHS funding over the years here: The NHS crisis - decades in the making