Afternoon Briefing Friday 20th March

0:00This episode of the Times Radio News Briefing is sponsored by PwCWC. Staying competitive means getting ahead, not just keeping up. So how do business leaders cut through the noise and focus on what really matters? PwC takes you further with tech, from optimising the systems that put your data to work, to scaling AI from proof of concept to competitive edge. PwC helps you meet tomorrow's tech demands so you can compete at a speed that rewrites the rules. Discover more at pwc.co.uk. Welcome to the Times Radio afternoon briefing for Friday the 20th of March. Energy bills are expected to rise by more than£300 this summer.

0:43The conflict in the Middle East is pushing up prices of oil and gas. Forecaster Cornwall Insight has updated its prediction for the July price cap to£1 ,973. That's£332 higher than the April cap. The Times' political editor Stephen Swinford says ministers appear to have misjudged the seriousness of the conflict. The government is trying to play this down at every step of the way. I was speaking to someone very senior in government a couple of weeks ago. They were telling me, look, it's going to be relatively short-lived, this conflict. We'll be out of it. It's not going to be that economically damaging.

1:14They were wrong, and this now looks very seriously economically damaging. And in Cabinet, there is now a conversation about something that was previously in a murder. The US military is targeting Iranian vessels in the Strait of Hormuz as part of efforts to reopen the vital waterway. General Dan Kane, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says the US is deploying low-flying aircraft and Apache helicopters. Reporter Sally Lockwood in Dubai says attacks are continuing there today. Suddenly there were emergency alerts on our phones. There was a loud fast jet that came very low over my house, terrified my toddler.

1:48And then we heard very loud air defence blasts in the sky. We've had confirmation that the missiles and drones were intercepted successfully over the UAE this morning. The number of suspected cases of meningitis following the outbreak in Kent has risen to 29. The father of an 18-year-old girl who died from the infection says his daughter was fit, healthy and strong, and died just one day after showing symptoms. Robin May is the UK Health Security Agency's chief scientific officer. He's told Times Radio the number of infections is unusually high. He says this strain could simply be more infectious.

2:21Many of us carry MenB as a bacteria without any problems in the back of our throats all the time. So it could be that this is a bacteria that's just more likely to progress to disease. We don't know that. We've been working, as you can imagine, around the clock since the discovery of this outbreak to try and understand more about it, including doing DNA sequencing, so genome sequencing for this strain. That is due back very, very soon now. We will start to analyse that. The government's borrowing rose to£14.3 billion last month. That's£2.2 billion higher than in February last year. It's also the second highest level for February since records began.

2:56Times business columnist Ian King says the reason for this is simple. The government is spending more than it's raising in taxation, so it has to borrow. And if you look at the year-on-year comparisons, well, government spending during the month of February was up£10.8 billion on February last year. The amount the government took in in tax was up by only£8.1 billion. And that, of course, is in spite of the fact that Rachel Reeves has raised national insurance in the interim for employers. And you can follow the Times Radio News Briefing on Spotify and listen live to Times Radio online. This episode of the Times Radio News Briefing is sponsored by PwC.

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