Morning Briefing Tuesday 26th November

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The Prime Minister says that Britain simply isn't working, adding bosses must improve at keeping the long-term sick in their jobs. Secure Starmer is promising an overhaul of job centres and will send more NHS staff to areas with the highest rate of worklessness.

under plans to deal with unemployment and a growing sickness crisis. Critics are asking whether the plan will be enough to stem the surging cost of ill health, as reform of the benefits system is put back to next year. But the Libre MP, a member of the Treasury Select Committee, Dame Chaffron McDonough, told Times Radio that Job Center reform was welcome.

Our job centres at the moment don't really inspire anyone. What they're about is calculating your benefit entitlements, not just seeing what you might need to help you get to work where we all know that working is great for mental health, great for physical health, the distraction from just a boredom and an introspection of not doing anything.

Meanwhile, ministers are to announce millions in extra funding for lawyers to represent asylum seekers in a bit to clear that growing backlog of appeals. According to the Times, there are almost 63,000 claims awaiting an outcome with each appeal taking an average of 46 weeks, leaving tens of thousands of migrants in limbo in hotels.

There are currently only enough lawyers available to represent about half of the claimants, with some even resorting to representing themselves. Moraine is due to fall today and tomorrow in southern England and south Wales, where flooding and high winds from Stormburt have caused major disruption to homes, roads and rail networks. At least five people have died in the storm that struck much of the UK at the weekend.

the prompted criticism about a lack of preparation and insufficient warnings. The leader of the Welsh Conservatives, Andrew R.T. Davis, told Times Radio that communities are feeling ignored. It would seem that only five years after we had Storm Dennis in 2020, that sadly, many of the properties who have been given assurances that government and the regulated natural resources weigh over the land that those same properties are flooded all over again.

So really a very frustrating, angry and upset community is now in the wealth's valleys, wondering who to believe when it comes to the assurances that they're being given. And the federal judge has dismissed a major case against Donald Trump, which accused him of attempting to overturn the US election result in 2020. The case had been put on hold for months after his team argued he couldn't be prosecuted.

It's based on a ruling from the Supreme Court that presidents have partial immunity while in office. Special prosecutor Jack Smith has also asked a court to abandon the case relating to classified documents Trump took home from the White House.

He says this latest development doesn't come as a surprise. There was no way these charges would ever lead to trials in either case. Jack Smith was going to be fired on Trump's first day in office and I think that rather than face that, he decided to throw the talent.

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