Afternoon briefing Friday 29th May

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. This is Times Radio's afternoon briefing on Friday the 29th of May. Romania's defence ministry says there was no real opportunity to shoot down a Russian drone before it hit an apartment building in the eastern city of Galatz.

0:48Two people were injured in the attack in which the devices were being used to target Ukraine's border regions. Romania, which is a member of NATO, has called the incident a serious violation of international law. The president of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, says Russia's war of aggression has crossed yet another line. The government will announce today that 300 ,000 new work experience and training placements are to be made available for young people over the next three years. It comes as the number of the UK's 16 - to 24-year-olds not in employment, education or training increased to more than a million.

1:23The former Labour Health Minister Alan Milburn told Times Radio yesterday that every business he had spoken to said they were increasingly reluctant to recruit young people, citing increases in the minimum wage as well as national insurance contributions. The pensions minister is Torsten Bell. It is not a coincidence that the increase in national insurance is followed by the biggest fall in NHS waiting lists in 17 years. That's what we've seen in recent months. That is happening because of the investment, the£26 billion extra we've put into the NHS. And what does that mean? It means more workers can actually go to work rather than waiting on NHS waiting lists for month after month.

1:59But the programme is facing questions over its viability. The Times' Andy Sylvester says it's difficult to understand how the government can assign so many people to work placements that don't appear to exist. In hospitality alone, one of the sectors in which he's talking about creating these work placements, there are hundreds of thousands of fewer jobs now than there were a couple of years ago because national insurance went up, because energy costs went up and because business rates went up. Even if this 300 ,000 programme works, of which there is scepticism, he is only undoing the damage done elsewhere by the government.

2:30Kent's County Council says it will step up public scrutiny of water supply, quality and infrastructure following a series of water outages in recent days. People in parts of the county are being warned that disruption to their supply could continue over the weekend. South East Water said its reservoirs have reached a critical level. Geoff Higgins relies on water for his jam-making business. He says a lack of production since Tuesday has already cost him up to£15 ,000. We've had the team redirected to do packing and labelling, things that we could do, but we've now run out of things to do. We can't do anything about it.

3:05They can't take their holidays because they're already allocated, so we have to pay them and they have to go home. And the Home Office is expected to begin using AI facial recognition to estimate the age of asylum seekers who claim to be children. The IT company behind it says the technology could also be used to determine the age of people who lack verifiable identity documents, such as those arriving in the UK on small boats. There's more on these stories throughout the day on Times Radio.

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