Morning briefing Friday 29th May

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. Good morning, this is your Times Radio News Briefing on Friday the 29th of May. Labour leader hopeful Andy Burnham has called for more state control in a detailed response to Tony Blair's criticism of the party.

0:48Writing in The Times, he blamed Blairite economics for the near collapse of mainstream politics. The former Prime Minister had recently warned against a lurch to the left, but the Mayor of Greater Manchester said that 40 years of neoliberalism and Thatcherite policies had failed Britain. Former Conservative MP Julie Kirkbride says his criticism is a fantasy. It is simply preposterous to suggest that there was some other way forward where we carried on subsidising the miners and having trade unions that ran riot around all sorts of basic services that the country would want. And actually, you know, in the early 1980s when Thatcher came along, we had incredible prosperity.

1:35Hundreds of thousands of new work experience and training placements are to be made available for young people over the next three years. The government announcement comes as the number of the UK's 16 to 24-year-olds not in employment, education or training rose to more than a million, the highest figure since 2013. Work and Pension Secretary Pat McFadden says the 300 ,000 new placements are backed by some of Britain's biggest employers. Alan Francis is from the Social Mobility Commission. This is not a new problem. The problem of NEETs, young people disengaged from education, employment or training, has been consistently high for a decade.

2:15It's got higher since Covid and that's what's triggered the latest round of anxiety about it because the numbers have gone very high. In fact today it's come to over a million and that's a million known needs. There are unknown needs as well. So the first point to make is it's a long-standing problem which hasn't had enough attention. The state of a peace deal between Iran and the US is still unclear. The White House yesterday said one was awaiting sign-off from President Trump, but that was soon rebuffed by Iranian state media. It continues a pattern of claim and counterclaim from both parties.

2:51Ben Berkovitz is from the US news agency Axios. This one feels different. It is different. It's operationally different. There is much more behind the scenes that has happened to get closer to a final agreement. At this point, it really is all over, but for the last couple of signatures, that being the president and the Ayatollah. But certainly there has been reason for skepticism. As you say, this has happened before. This one, though, is much further along. Temperatures are expected to cool down across the UK over the coming days, following a record-breaking spell of hot weather. Although the Met Office say warmth is set to remain in parts of the country through today, particularly in the south-east, where highs of 28 degrees Celsius are likely.

3:41Don't forget you can set the Times Radio News Briefing as your news service on Alexa. This episode of the Times Radio News Briefing is sponsored by PwC. AI is everywhere. In the news, in our hands, but return on investment, not so much. So how do you get beyond the hype and deliver AI that powers reinvention and growth across your business? Strong foundations unlock AI's potential. That's why PwC takes you further with tech, strengthening the data quality, processes and workflows that shape how well AI performs. PwC turns innovation into implementation so you can accelerate from experiment to scale.

4:24Discover more at pwc.co.uk.

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