Afternoon Briefing Monday 13th July

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 on Monday the 13th of July. Sir Oli Robbins, who was the most senior civil servant in the Foreign Office before being sacked by Sir Keir Starmer, has begun proceedings to request a judicial review.

0:48More details from Times Radio's newsroom reporter, Oli Cole. The FDA union representing Sir Oli says the outgoing Prime Minister should admit that sacking Oli was a mistake. The union says Sir Oli's dismissal was based on a grievous misunderstanding of how the national security vetting system works and a rash response to a media story. Sorli has said in a statement he brings the action reluctantly and adds it would have been unnecessary if the Prime Minister would simply apologise for his mistake and made amends for the distress and cost it has caused me and my family. Instead, he says, I now have to ask the courts to determine that the Prime Minister's decisions were unlawful, unreasonable and to quash them.

1:26Up to 1.6 million migrants could be granted indefinitely to remain after five years instead of ten. The Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, is said to be reworking some of her plans to make them more acceptable to Labour MPs. The Times' political editor Stephen Swinford says it's a tricky issue for Andy Burnham that becomes Prime Minister next Monday. He backs Shabana Mood and has been publicly very supportive of her and she thinks that they really need to do this, that they really need to be tough on migration and to show that they are being tough on legal migration as well. So that is the challenge here and it would be really interesting to see where Andy Burnham ends up on this.

2:04The Herb Secretary will set out legal steps later, potentially to deport the freed ringleader of a Rochdale grooming gang. Shabir Ahmed was jailed for multiple child sex offences. Shabana Mahmood is expected to change the 1971 Immigration Act, which prevents Ahmed from being deported to Pakistan. The campaigner Maggie Oliver says politicians of all stripes have failed on this. Why have they waited until he has actually been released back into the community to begin to address this problem? And this is not a party political point because the Conservatives were in power for all those years. It just shows once again how incompetent our governments are.

2:43They are reactive rather than proactive. And right now we might have another 10 years of arguing to get him deported. And the actor Sam Neill, best known for his roles in Jurassic Park and Peaky Blinders, has died at the age of 78. His family says he passed away surrounded by loved ones in Sydney. The New Zealander was diagnosed with blood cancer four years ago, but recently got the all clear. Speaking in 2023, he said he was grateful for global support. What was slightly annoying was that the story was sort of cancer, cancer, cancer, cancer. And really, the other half of the story is remission, remission, remission.

3:20It was very warming and surprising to get so many lovely messages of support and so on from all around the world. You can follow the Times Radio News Briefing on Spotify and listen live to Times Radio online.

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