Morning briefing Thursday 4th 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 Thursday the 4th of December. The Health Secretary has ordered an independent review of the diagnosis of mental health conditions, where Streeting says he's concerned about the sharp increase in diagnoses of mental illness, autism and ADHD, which have become the most common reasons for a sickness benefit claim.

0:56The number of working-age people who are claiming disability or incapacity benefit has increased by 1.2 million to more than 4 million since 2019. Tom Purser is the CEO of the charity Autism Action. Speaking to Times Radio, he rejected the health secretary's previous claim that too many people are being written off by over-diagnosis. Even if some areas do have a very high confirmation rate, that can often be because there are triage processes that come before that, which means that people are knocked off the system. The White House has confirmed that the US Special Envoy to Russia, Steve Witkoff, will meet the head of Ukraine's National Security Council, Rustem Umarov, for talks in Miami today.

1:39Witkoff spent almost five hours with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, in Moscow on Tuesday. Ukraine's foreign minister, Andrei Subyga, subsequently accused Putin of wasting the world's time. MI5 is expected to face censure for leaving a former Russian spy who was targeted in the Salisbury Novichok poisoning alarmingly accessible to assassins. Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with the nerve agent seven years ago in an attack that could have killed thousands. A public inquiry into the death of Dawn Sturgis, who was exposed to the Novichok four months after the attack, will publish its final report later.

2:17Ministers are hoping to escalate the police use of facial recognition and are planning a 10-week consultation to establish how it should be employed. Any new legislation will also take into account how to best protect people's right to privacy. The government is also proposing to create a regulator to oversee the police use of facial recognition, biometrics and other tools. Ryan Seby is the deputy political editor for The Sun. The biggest breakthrough since DNA matching, I think the fact that it's going to be rolled out into every town, some campaigners are against this, that it may feel like the country's turning into some sort of police state.

2:57but if we can take thousands of hardened criminals off the streets, that's kind of got to be a good thing, but again, it's got to be balanced with those civil liberties rules. And King Charles displayed his language skills and spoke of the special friendship between Britain and Germany as he hosted President Frank-Walter Steinmeier at a state banquet at Windsor Castle last night. It's coming to me as if our city visit would be in Germany. Charles told guests that the two nations had endured the darkest times of conflict, but that their acknowledgments of past suffering had become the basis for an honest, renewed friendship.

3:34The banquet was attended by 150 guests, including the supermodel Claudia Schiffer and the composer Hans Zimmer. You can follow the Times News Briefing on Spotify and listen live to Times Radio online.

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