Morning briefing Monday 1st December

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 Morning Briefing for Monday 1st December. Ministers have accused Sakia Starmer and Rachel Reeves of misleading the Cabinet by claiming there was a hole in the public finances to justify tax rises in the budget.

0:46The Office for Budget Responsibility told the Chancellor in mid-September that public finances were in better shape than previous forecasts. Luke Francis is a former Labour advisor. The devil is absolutely in the detail here, and I suspect both critics and perhaps some Labour MPs and ministers will be poring over every syllable that the Chancellor uttered in the run-up to the budget and now cross-checking that against the timeline that the Office for Budget Responsibility has set out in their letter to parliamentarians. But this feels yet again like a problem entirely of the government's own making.

1:23Sir Keir Starmer will support the budget in a speech later today. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage has submitted a letter to the Prime Minister's ethics advisor, formally requesting an investigation into potentially serious breaches of the ministerial code. European defence ministers are meeting later to discuss military support for Ukraine after talks between diplomats from Washington and Kyiv. The US Secretary of State Marco Rubio says they went over revisions to Donald Trump's 28-point peace deal and described the talks as useful. Ambassador Daniel Fried is a retired US diplomat. It was good to hear Marco Rubio say those things.

2:01Those are good principles. now we Americans need to mean it and that will involve putting up the pressure on the Russians instead of putting the pressure on the Ukrainians which has too often been the American administration's default mode. Raising a child can cost parents almost a quarter of a million pounds. On average, parents spent nearly£14 ,000 a year on their child from pregnancy until their 18th birthday. That's according to research by Money Farm, which is an investment platform, The most expensive period of a child's life was between 15 and 18 years old. Spending on health, beauty and personal care items had doubled compared with 2023.

2:43The rail watchdog has barred Avanti West Coast from selling seats on the 7am weekday service from Manchester Piccadilly to London Euston, meaning that the train will only have staff on board. The unusual arrangement will come into force in two weeks' time. And Oxford University Press has named its word or phrase of the year as rage bait. It's a term that describes manipulative tactics used to drive engagement online, with its usage increasing threefold in the last 12 months, according to the Dictionary Publisher. Rage bait beat two other shortlisted terms, aura farming and biohack, to win the title.

3:21And you can follow The Times News Briefing on Spotify and listen live to Times Radio Online. 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.

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