Afternoon briefing Tuesday 18th November

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 afternoon briefing on Tuesday the 18th of November. A Labour MP has told Times Radio there are more backbenchers who are opposed to the government's asylum changes.

0:44So far, at least 25 have voiced their concerns, calling the plans repugnant and deeply offensive. Kat Eccles says ministers have got it vastly wrong. I can't believe that we've got cabinet members saying that this is a compassionate plan. It's absolutely not compassionate. It's the opposite. And I stand by what I said, that it does have echoes of reform and populist opinion. But the Housing Secretary, Steve Reid, insists Ms Eccles is in a minority. You are always going to have a range of views when you're speaking to people in the Labour Party. I've been in this party for decades and people are never shy about coming forward with their view.

1:23But the vast majority of members of the Labour Party and Labour MPs know that we need to deal with this problem because of the harm that it's doing to our country and to social cohesion. The Conservatives and Reform UK have welcomed the plans but question whether the government can get its MPs to support them. The competition watchdog has launched investigations into eight companies over online pricing. The Competition and Markets Authority is particularly concerned about practices like drip pricing, where companies advertise a low price when you buy but add mandatory fees before checkout, and misleading countdowns which put pressure on customers.

2:00Times Radio's business correspondent Dominic O 'Connell says it's a big development in competition policy. It catches up with this idea that consumer protections that have always been available in ordinary markets, real markets, are being circumvented online with all kinds of hidden charges, unfair sales tactics, all kinds of things to bump up the final price you pay. Net migration numbers for the last four years have been revised down because the Office for National Statistics has improved the way it calculates people who emigrate. The ONS says the peak of net migration in 2023 was higher than previously thought, but numbers have fallen sharply since.

2:35Kemi Badenokh says a future Conservative government would reinstate the two-child benefit cap if the Chancellor scraps it in next week's budget. There were 231 ,949 marriages and civil partnerships in England and Wales in 2023, down 8.6 % on the year before. The ONS says the most popular wedding date was Saturday 2nd September. And a two-year study suggests the southwest of England could be a suitable place to reintroduce this animal, which is critically endangered in the UK.

3:09That is a wild cat. Only 115 are left in the wild, despite it being the UK's oldest surviving native cat species. Conservationists think Mid-Devon has the habitat, sufficient food and enough local support for wild cats to thrive. Cat Jeffs from the Devon Wildlife Trust says the species needs its own dedicated space. The numbers had got so low and they were at such low densities that they started to interbreed with the domestic cat. Basically what's happened is you've got these hybrid animals and that's been, you know, almost catastrophic for the species. Don't forget to subscribe to The Times News Briefing on Spotify or listen live to Times Radio online.

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