Morning briefing Friday 26th June

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 Times Radio's morning briefing on Friday the 26th of June. The monarchy's core funding is to double within three years, rising to almost£100 million.

0:44A new formula has been agreed whereby the royal household will receive 20.5 % of crown estate profits, an increase from 12%. Palace officials have also announced that the king and queen will not move into Buckingham Palace when renovation work costing almost£370 million is completed next year. The Times Royal editor Kate Mansi says the increased funding will be used to pay for a backlog in maintenance at occupied royal palaces. The palace will say actually there's other historic heritage buildings that need redoing, so Windsor Castle, Kensington Palace, we have new tech and cyber considerations.

1:22The king is doing more engagements than the late queen did, for example, in her latter years, so that needs funding as well. The king has also become the first monarch in history to publish his tax bill. It showed he paid£12.9 million for the last financial year. Labour has resurrected a proposal by the Conservatives to house asylum seekers at a former RAF base in North Yorkshire. The disused base in Linton-on-Ouse is among three military sites to have been earmarked by the Home Office to accommodate 3 ,750 asylum seekers as part of its efforts to move migrants out of hotels. The head of the NHS says everyone must be held to account for maternity failings after it emerged that three senior managers who presided over the avoidable deaths of babies in Nottingham have CBEs.

2:12Sir Jim Mackey said he would seek to rewrite the contracts of NHS bosses so that they could be punished for failures under their watch at previous hospitals and end a merry-go-round of failing leaders. A review published on Wednesday reported that more than 2 ,500 mothers and babies had died or been harmed at Nottingham University Hospital's NHS Trust between 2012 and 2025. The Foreign Secretary of Etc Coopers confirmed£2 million in UK funding to aid the emergency response following two earthquakes in Venezuela. At least 235 people have died, although the US Geological Survey and local agencies such as the International Rescue Committee say thousands more could have been killed.

2:56Kieran Donnelly is the Senior Vice President for Crisis Response, Recovery and Development at the IRC. Speaking to Times Radio, he said the rescue effort is being hampered by supply chain and economic constraints. In Venezuela, simply being able to purchase the levels of supplies that we need at the scale we need them isn't straightforward, and bringing new supplies into the country isn't going to be straightforward. The government obviously has called for international assistance, but it's going to take partnership from international partners from the US, providing funding and facilitating with some of those supply chain challenges.

3:30And Scotland's hopes of featuring in the knockout phase of the World Cup have suffered a further setback after Ecuador booked their place in the last 32 as one of the best-performing third-place teams. Starting their final group match with just one point, Ecuador came from a goal down to beat the Group E winners Germany by two goals to one. There's more on these stories throughout the day on Times Radio.

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