Afternoon briefing Monday 23rd February

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 the Times Radio afternoon briefing on Monday 23rd February. The Australian Prime Minister has told Sir Keir Starmer he would support efforts to remove Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor from the line of succession.

0:45The government needs the agreement of every other country where the king is head of state in order to make that change. The former prince has denied any wrongdoing. The Prince of Wales suggested he's not in a calm state when he appeared at the BAFTAs last night. The royal commentator Jenny Bond thinks it was an intentional comment. Well, William knows perfectly well that we're going to pick up on everything he says. This was a conversation with someone at the BAFTAs. It wasn't necessarily the broadcast, but he's not daft. Of course he's not in a calm state. I think he's probably in despair and anger, a great deal of anger, I think.

1:20I think William saw this coming some time ago. Two former civil servants say Andrew charged the taxpayer for massages he received while he was working as a government trade envoy. Emails from the Epstein files appear to show Sarah Ferguson introduced her 22-year-old goddaughter to Epstein a year after his release from prison for child sex crimes. He appeared to consider employing Poppy Cottrell and making a$100 ,000 donation to a health charity in her name. BBC and BAFTA have been criticised after a man with Tourette's syndrome shouted a highly offensive racist slur at last night's ceremony. It happened when two black actors presented an award.

1:56Throughout the morning, the word could be heard in the BBC's edited coverage of the ceremony, but Ed Palmer from the charity Tourette's Action thinks it should have been edited out. This is really one of the most acute examples of where something that is a disability can cause quite understandably huge amounts of offence to someone. So if it's being pre-recorded now, then bleeping it out, for example, might be a reasonable compromise. The BBC and BAFTA have apologised for any offence cause, but Hannah Buechler, the first black person to win an Oscar for production design, says the way they've done that has made it worse.

2:35The government will introduce new lower tiers of special needs support from 2030 to try to bring down the cost in England. Children will not need a diagnosis in order to get individual support plans, which will have two levels and will be legally binding. Those will sit below education, health and care plans which are in place currently, and one in eight children currently with EHCPs will transition onto ISPs instead. And the Times can reveal new AI data centres currently being planned in the UK would use up more electricity than the whole country combined. The regulator Ofgem has revealed 140 centres alone would use 50 gigawatts at their peak, compared to a recent nationwide peak of 45 gigawatts.

3:16Times Radio's business correspondent Dominic O 'Connell says it'll be hard to make up for that with new energy sources. Grid connections are in a real mess at the minute. There's an enormous queue for new generation projects as well as demand like AI. Grid connections are running out into the late 2030s. It was such a big queue. Ofgem has tried to fix it, but recently it's said that really its attempt to do this hasn't worked. So AI data centres and demand for energy is a big issue. But I think the more pressing issue is probably grid connections. Don't forget to subscribe to the Times Radio News Briefing on Spotify or listen live to Times Radio online.

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