Council leader: improving women's safety "priority" for Leeds
We've been putting your questions to James Lewis in our exclusive #LeadersInLockdown interview
WATCH: James Lewis answers your questions in our exclusive #LeadersInLockdown interview from 7pm on Thursday 18th March.
The leader of Leeds City Council says improving women's safety will be a "priority" after what happened to Sarah Everard in London.
We've been putting your questions to James Lewis for our exclusive #LeadersinLockdown interview.
Many people got in touch with us wanting to know what the council's doing in response to the debate over women's safety sparked by the murder of Sarah Everard.
Sarke asked James what's being done to support girls and young women who face sexual violence.
This was the leader's response:
"We'll continue to work through our community safety work around putting additional steps in place to support the safety of women and girls. It's something that we ourselves and lots of voluntary organisations work on as a city together.
"The current Lord Mayor Eileen Taylor, chose SARSVL, a charity that works in this area - that's something we are very keen to support. So we will continue to raise the profile. But a lot of the ability of the council to act comes back to the fact that we have had our budgets cut by central government austerity.
"We have a very strong committment to supporting the most vulnerable in the city. A huge amount of our council budget goes on supporting vulnerable people through children's social services and through adult social care.
"That's a big part of what we do and we need to continue to be campaigning and raising awareness and making sure everything we do as a council supports those objectives."
Elsie asked about a particular alleyway near Headingley Stadium after a campaign to make it safer.
James said work is underway to sort it out:
"I know that they've arranged for the foliage to be cut back down there to make people to be feel safer, for extra lighting, and they've also got funding in place for CCTV. OUr councillors have worked with the council and with other organisations in the area to try and bring CCTV to that alley and it'll be happening soon."
We put your questions to James about businesses, climate change, women's safety and many more subjects.
You can watch the full #LeadersInLockdown interview at 7pm tonight here.