Evening Briefing Tuesday 1st September

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 Hello, this is your Times Radio Evening Breathing for Tuesday 1st September with me, James Kitchen. The Prime Minister says things in Britain are not working as they should, insisting he'll put problem-solving over point scoring.

0:47Andy Burnham's pledged to ground his decisions in the bedrock of fiscal responsibility, but said he would be relentless in giving people back ownership and control. Addressing MPs for the first time since taking office, Mr Burnham argued Britain had taken a series of wrong turns since the 1980s. Political power was centralised. Economic power privatised, the country de-industrialised, austerity followed, hollowing out councils and depriving them of the agency to act to reverse any of this. And then Brexit compounded the damage, ushering in a decade of low growth and stalled regeneration. Responding to the statement, the Conservative leader, Kemi Beidnok, accused Labour of crushing the economy, warning the Prime Minister was living in the past.

1:41His ideas are all about more government control, more spending, more tax, more politicians. Conservatives want people to keep more of their own money. We want businesses to grow, to invest, to expand and to create more jobs. That is the difference between the Labour Party and the Conservative Party. His diagnosis is completely wrong. His theory of growth is completely wrong. Meanwhile, Zakir Starmer is to stand down as an MP, triggering a by-election in his Hobon and St Pancras seat. The former Prime Minister says he wants to focus on international affairs in his work on violence against women and girls.

2:19The move raises the prospect of a potential run for the Green Party leader Zak Polanski to stand for Parliament. Times Radio's political editor Anna Mihailova has been looking at what Starmer may do next. What he's going to be doing is joining the lovely and comfortable circuit of former world leaders who tend to go to conferences and talk about how to solve the world's problems, which suddenly becomes extremely easy when you don't have to be the one doing it. He will earn probably a nice amount of money doing that. A man has appeared in court charged with murder after a house fire that killed a seven-year-old girl and her aunt near Middlesbrough.

3:00Four others were injured in the fire in Grangetown during the early hours of last Wednesday. 23-year-old Jaden Wright of No Fixed Address attended a hearing which lasted less than two minutes. He's been remanded in custody. Officials say the number of people killed in last week's flash floods in Nepal and Tibet has risen to more than 1 ,000. Up to 48 British nationals remain missing. Search and rescue teams are working to save hundreds of workers thought to be trapped in hydropower tunnels. The Met Office says this summer's been the UK's warmest on record. Temperatures averaged 16.5 degrees during June, July and August, beating the previous record set last year.

3:42The meteorologist Steph Goulter has been looking at the figures. The highest ever temperature we've got was in 2022 and we got to 40.3 degrees. We didn't get that extreme temperature this time. It was the length of time that we had the very hot weather that was exceptional. So it started, if you remember back in spring, we had the highest temperature we've ever seen in May. That beat the old record by two degrees. And then in June we had another hottest ever June temperature on record. And then it just continued. Remember, you can follow The Times Radio News Briefing on Spotify and you can listen live to Times Radio Online.

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