Evening briefing Wednesday 16th 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. This is the Times evening briefing for Wednesday the 16th of September. Police hunting a missing three-year-old boy in Suffolk say there's nothing to suggest a crime has been committed.

0:46Noah Woods, who's partially deaf and doesn't speak, disappeared from a playground in Brantham more than 24 hours ago. Sky correspondent Emma Birchley spoke to Times Radio Drive about the latest developments. Official search teams are really focusing on the heart of the village. And we've actually seen today, this afternoon, dive teams from the Metropolitan Police playing their role, looking in Decoy Pond, which is just along from where I am here now. And the search for the volunteers is beyond the boundary of the village, really. It's more fields and hedgerows. And there's really clear advice about how to search.

1:25Andy Burnham has said the budget will be challenging because of the impact of the Iran war, but denied being a traditional tax and spend socialist. The Prime Minister said John Healy, the Chancellor, would exercise the highest degree of prudence on October 28th after it emerged that inflation rose from 2.9 % in April to 3.1 % in August. Chief UK economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics Rob Wood says figures are due to get much worse. The acceleration inflation in August is down to the war in Iran. Petrol prices surged and no one filling up in a forecourt can fail to have noticed how much they've gone up.

2:00That's both because oil prices have gone up, also refining capacities being hit by that war and also fighting in Ukraine. That's why inflation accelerated. It's going to go up more. Utility prices are going to rise in January. We're going to hit an inflation rate of about four and a half percent and a lot of that will be energy. Homeowners are facing higher mortgage payments after eight leading lenders put up mortgage rates. NatWest, Santander, HSBC, Lloyds, Barclays, Nationwide, Halifax and TSB are all increasing rates this week in response to the rising costs of borrowing. Santander added 0.45 percentage points to some of its deals.

2:37NatWest put up to 0.43 percentage points on its rates. and Barclays' market-leading two-year fix went from 4.55 % to 4.75%. A wealthy banker suspected of being the so-called Putney pusher has been found dead at his home three months after being arrested. 44-year-old Nicholas Brandrum was held on suspicion of grievous bodily harm in June, nine years after a woman was shoved in front of a bus by a jogger on Putney Bridge. Brandrum, who was a descendant of Queen Victoria, was found dead at his property in Chiswick yesterday evening. The police say the death is being treated as unexpected but is not believed to be suspicious.

3:19The culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, has branded social media platform X an utter disgrace after executives failed to attend a meeting about online abuse directed towards lifeboat volunteers. Lisa Nandy said the company didn't even respond to an invitation sent to firms to discuss charity workers' addresses being posted online. She says she's prepared to change the law, making a specific criminal offence to post a person's address on the Internet. You can hear more of these stories throughout the evening on Times Radio.

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