Evening briefing Monday 1st September

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0:35This is the Times Evening Briefing for Monday 1st September. The Home Secretary has warned the broken asylum system needs to be controlled and managed. Yvette Cooper has been setting out an overhaul that will see changes to the appeals system and a pause in family reunifications. She also aims to end the use of asylum hotels by 2029. I understand and agree with local councils and communities who want the asylum hotels in their communities closed because we need to close all asylum hotels and we need to do so for good. But that must be done in a controlled and orderly manner and not through a return to the previous government's chaos that led to the opening of hotels in the first place.

1:20Angela Rayner's silence over her tax affairs is down to a court order, according to a Downing Street spokesman. Sir Keir Starmer has been defending his deputy, calling her a great story of British success amid questions over the handling of a former home that was valued at the threshold for inheritance tax. Number 10 says Rainer is urgently trying to lift the order to aid transparency. The Prime Minister has rejigged his Downing Street team, bringing more economic firepower to Number 10. Darren Jones has to shift from Number 2 at the Treasury to be Chief Secretary to the PM. Sukhya Starmer has also appointed a former Bank of England Deputy Governor, Baroness Shafik, to be his Chief Economic Advisor.

1:55The Times' politics newsletter editor Stefan Boscher says there's also a new communications chief. Tim Allen has been around for a very long time. He is an incredibly skilled guy, I think. He was back with Tony Blair even when he was opposition leader and even before them. Having met him a couple of times, he's a really capable guy. I think he'll have some right ideas. But whether he can deal with the current churn of the news cycle, just how bad things are for Labour in the polls, and also just the core dysfunction of this number 10, it'll be a really big job. 47 more people have been charged over support for the prescribed terror group Palestine Action.

2:28The Metropolitan Police say they were arrested at a demonstration in July. It brings the number charged in London to 114. A retired vicar has been jailed for three years after admitting carrying out an extreme body modification. 79-year-old Geoffrey Bolcom also pleaded guilty to having indecent images of children. The East Sussex man was an associate of a notorious Norwegian national known as the eunuch maker. A huge search and rescue operation is underway after an earthquake in Afghanistan. More than 800 are feared dead and thousands more injured as several villages were flattened. The shallow magnitude 6 quake hit near the eastern city of Jalalabad and was also felt in Pakistan and India.

3:06Jeremy Smith is country manager for the British Red Cross. He told Times Radio the worst affected areas have been cut off. With the amounts of people still unaccounted for under the rubble, we have fears that that number will grow. For us, our key priority is of course search and rescue. Our local volunteers have been supporting the response since the first hours. This happened around midnight local time when people were sleeping and then found themselves trapped under rubble. So we know that search and rescue has to continue. You can follow The Times News Briefing on Spotify and listen live to Times Radio online.

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