Morning briefing Monday 27th October

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 on Monday 27th October. I'm Daryl Jackson. An investigation by MPs has found the Home Office has squandered billions of pounds housing migrants in hotels due to incompetence.

0:47The Home Affairs Committee found that a series of failures by the Home Office allowed the estimated cost of the 10-year asylum accommodation contracts to soar from£4.5 billion to£15.3 billion. The report also revealed that despite the rising cost of asylum hotels, the Home Office has failed to collect£46 million it was owed from two companies providing accommodation. Claire Pearsall is a former Home Office advisor and told Times Radio it is a damning report. What I find a staggering error on the part of the Home Office is they're not even penalising those companies who have behaved below contract expectations.

1:30Now, those clauses would have been in there. It's absolutely right for the Home Office to use them. But they seemingly have almost buried their head in their sands and said that we can't cope. That is not a state for a government department to be in. The father of Hadash Kabartu's teenage victim says his family is infuriated by the asylum seeker's wrongful release. Last month, Kabartu was convicted of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl and a woman in Essex. On Friday, he was mistakenly freed from HMP Chelmsford. He was due to be deported. He was caught yesterday morning in North London. Danny Shaw, policing and home affairs reporter, told Times Radio there's to be an independent As part of that independent review, what it ought to do is to look at why so many other prisoners are being released in error.

2:17262 in the 12 months to the end of March. That was double the figure the previous year. The number's been increasing for several years now. To see whether this is some kind of systemic problem across prisons in England and Wales, which I fear it probably is. I don't think this was an isolated case. A trade deal between the US and China is drawing nearer as officials from both nations have agreed an initial framework for President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping to finalise. It includes a final deal on TikTok's US operations and the deferral on China's tightened rare earth mineral controls.

2:52The two leaders are due to hold talks on Thursday in South Korea. The Chancellor is leading a UK delegation to Saudi Arabia as she searches for economic growth with less than a month to go before a potentially difficult budget. Rachel Rees will use the visit to Riyadh try to make progress on the trade deal with the Gulf Cooperation Council. A series of announcements on investment between the UK and Saudi Arabia are expected over the coming days. And it's claimed average rental prices being advertised reached a new record high in the third quarter of this year. The property website Rightmove says that across Britain, excluding London, the average monthly advertised rent reached a new record of£1 ,385.

3:35It means that on average, rents outside of London were 3.1 % higher than a year ago. And you can hear more on all of those stories throughout the day on Times Radio.

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