Morning briefing Wednesday 3rd 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 Good morning. The end of the Russia-Ukraine war is no closer after Putin's meeting with Trump's envoy. The talks in Moscow lasted over five hours.

0:42The Kremlin said the meeting was useful, constructive and meaningful, but no compromise had been reached. The White House said it was very optimistic a deal would be reached on the peace plan, but President Putin said proposals added by the Europeans were unacceptable. Katerina Lysyanova is a Ukrainian correspondent in the US. If in some parallel reality, Ukraine would agree on such demands and a big part of their territory would be occupied by Russians, I do not ever see that it will lead to some kind of peace. It will just see the disaster of people trapped on their territories. And also we would see Russia preparing to max aggression, next attack.

1:26Rachel Reeve's decision to raise taxes to the highest level on record will constrain economic growth for years, leading economists have warned. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development said the Chancellor's decision to raise£26 billion in taxes would act as a headwind to the economy until 2029. Alicia Fitzgerald is a political correspondent. Previous budgets recently tried to stimulate the economy through small tax cuts or higher spending. And this one really has led more towards the tightening and the increasing. And Rachel Reeves and Labour will say that this might help public finances.

2:04But the trouble is, is it arrives at a time when households are so squeezed already and productivity is really weak. Given that backdrop, it's not massively surprising that economists are really digging down into this and just saying that at the moment, the country can't really deal with tax rises given how sluggish growth is. Sir Keir Starmer has signalled that the government will intensify its criticism of Brexit. It's as Labour moves to put relations with Brussels at the heart of its campaign against Reform UK. In a speech in the City of London, the Prime Minister said Britain's departure from the EU was an utterly reckless template for foreign policy and criticised the world promises of those who'd campaigned to leave in 2016.

2:45The case against two men accused of spying for China collapsed at the 11th hour because of systemic failures by prosecutors and government officials. In a highly critical report, the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy said the handling of the case against Christopher Cash and Christopher Berry had been beset by confusion and was at times shambolic. However, it cleared ministers of interfering in the prosecution to avoid antagonizing China. It said it found no evidence of a coordinated high-level effort to bring about the collapse of the prosecution. West Reading, the health secretary has accused the British Medical Association of standing in the way of progress by opposing changes to online consultations.

3:30Labour has ordered GP surgeries to offer the service throughout the working day, enabling patients to request appointments and ask questions online from eight in the morning till six thirty in the evening. The aim is to end the early morning scramble for appointments. And MPs have launched an inquiry into the Crown Estate property leases held by the Royal Family. It's in response to Andrew Mountbatten Windsor's arrangement at Royal Lodge. The Times revealed in October that Andrew had paid a peppercorn rent on the 30-room estate for the past two decades. It's prompted the investigation by the Public Accounts Committee, which begins in the new year.

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