Afternoon briefing Thursday 4th December

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 your Times Afternoon Briefing for Thursday 4th December. The number of people in hospital in England with flu is 56 % higher than a year ago.

0:431 ,700 flu patients were in hospital beds each day on average in England last week. Alongside this, the NHS has warned people with minor problems not to go to A &E. But the president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, Ian Higginson, told Times Radio the bigger problem is not enough beds or help in care outside of hospitals. There are loads and loads of patients in our hospital beds who don't need to be there. and they can't go home either because the services aren't there to support them at home or because they can't get into residential facilities like care homes or nursing homes to help them recover.

1:16And these problems have been absolutely in plain sight for years and years and yet our politicians have failed to act on it. The Children's Minister has told Times Radio he wants the review into mental health diagnoses to look into regional variations. A review launched by the Health Secretary will assess how mental health problems, autism and ADHD are diagnosed. These have become the most common reasons for a sickness benefit claim. The public inquiry into the death of Dawn Sturgis, who was exposed to Novichok in 2018, is expected to criticise MI5 for failing to protect a former Russian spy and the wider public.

1:53Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned by the nerve agent but survived. Dawn Sturgis accidentally came across the substance, left by Russian assassins and died. Christo Grozhev, investigative journalist at Bellingcat, told Times Radio that several European countries had missed the culprits. Four years before the poisoning of the Skripals and the killing of Sturgis, the same group had been in Bulgaria and had poisoned twice with Novichok, a Bulgarian arms dealer. So this had been happening for years and nobody was prepared for that. Vladimir Putin has told an Indian newspaper that Russia would take full control of Ukraine's Donbass region by force unless Ukrainian forces withdrew.

2:33The Russian president referred to it as liberating the region. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said Russia should not be rewarded for a war it started. Reform UK has been the recipient of the largest ever donation to a political party by a living person. Businessman Christopher Harbourn, who used to give to the Conservatives, has given£9 million. Local government minister Miata Fanbulur has said Labour are as up for elections as anyone else, as the Conservatives criticise them for postponing mayoral elections for roles due to start next spring. She said in Parliament they wanted to give time for the office around them to be established before the new mayors are elected.

3:12Josh McAllister, the children's minister, has also told Times Radio that he supports using live facial recognition technology on children. More cameras are going to be rolled out across the country to catch criminals as only six police forces use them at the moment regularly. Police will be able to compare live footage with passport and driving license photos for quick identification. Mr McAllister was asked whether children should be included in these plans. I think we should. Look, there's lots of young people I'm really worried about who are caught up in county lines activity and they're really vulnerable and we need to know where they are, we need to identify them.

3:47The group Big Brother Watch says it's the end of privacy as we know it. For more stories like this, listen throughout the day to Times Radio. This episode of the Times Radio News Briefing is sponsored by PwC. AI is everywhere. In the news, in our hands, but return on investment, not so much. So how do you get beyond the hype and deliver AI that powers reinvention and growth across your business? Strong foundations unlock AI's potential. that's why pwc takes you further with tech strengthening the data quality processes and workflows that shape how well ai performs pwc turns innovation into implementation so you can accelerate from experiment to scale discover more at pwc.co.uk you've got social dialed in search is doing its thing so why do your marketing results look the same as six months ago that's because you're fishing in the same pond as everyone else.

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