Afternoon.

It’s Tuesday 22nd September: Britain has borrowed more than expected, Martha’s Rule is coming to every A&E in England and pet owners are getting some new protections from expensive vet bills.

Kettle on.

📅 On this day: In 1955, ITV began broadcasting, giving Britain its first commercial television channel and ending the BBC’s monopoly. It initially launched only in London, with the first TV advert following that evening. It was for toothpaste. They started as they meant to go on.

The government borrowed £18.3bn in August, around a fifth more than in the same month last year. Government borrowing is basically the gap between what the state receives through things like taxes and what it spends. So when spending exceeds income, the Treasury has to borrow the difference.

The slightly awkward timing is that the figures arrive ahead of the Budget. Borrowing so far this financial year is actually £2.2bn lower than at the same point last year, but it is still £8.1bn above the official forecast. That gives the government less room to play with when deciding what to do with taxes and spending.

Government debt, meanwhile, remains just below £3 trillion. Cancelling a few subscriptions probably won’t cover it.

Patients and their families will be able to ask for an urgent review of their care in every A&E in England under an expansion of Martha’s Rule.

The system allows a patient, relative or member of NHS staff to contact a separate hospital team if they are worried someone’s condition is getting worse and feel their concerns aren’t being acted on.

It is named after 13-year-old Martha Mills, who died from sepsis in 2021 after her family repeatedly raised concerns about her deteriorating condition. The rule was introduced on hospital wards in 2024 and has since been extended to maternity services.

A&E departments will now be added in stages, with the rollout due to reach all of them by March 2028.

Employees who lose a close family member will get a legal right to bereavement leave from April next year. The new right will cover the death of a spouse or partner, parent, adult child or sibling, including step, adoptive, foster and kinship-care relationships.

Women and their partners who experience a pregnancy loss before 24 weeks will also be entitled to up to two weeks off.

The new leave will generally be unpaid. At the moment, there is no general legal right to bereavement leave in Great Britain, although many employers already offer compassionate leave of their own.

Pet owners are getting more protection from unexpectedly large vet bills after the competition regulator confirmed a package of reforms. Among them, vets will have to make prices clearer, tell customers they can buy prescribed medicines elsewhere and cap the fee for a written prescription at £21 for the first medicine and £12.50 for each additional one.

Worth noting before you march into the surgery waving this email: the prescription caps are being phased in. Larger vet businesses have until March 2027 to comply, while smaller ones have until September 2027.

Britain’s air traffic control system has suffered its second technical failure in two weeks, causing another round of flight cancellations and delays.

The latest problem hit NATS’s control centre in Prestwick, which manages much of the airspace over Scotland, Northern Ireland and northern England. More than 200 flights were cancelled, with further delays after the fault itself had been fixed.

NATS says this fault was unrelated to the software problem earlier this month that led to more than 2,000 cancellations. Airlines are, understandably, not enormously reassured by the distinction.

Britain and the US have fired a torpedo from an unmanned underwater vehicle for the first time. The British-built vessel can operate without a crew and was used to launch an American torpedo during trials, as the two countries develop technology designed to perform military tasks underwater with greater autonomy.

It is essentially a very large underwater drone. 

Nearly four million records relating to enslaved people in 20 former British colonies have been made searchable online. The records date from 1813 to 1840 and include names, ages and family relationships. They were originally compiled by the British government as part of efforts to monitor slavery and prevent illegal trading.

They have now been digitised through a project involving Ancestry and University College London, making family histories that were previously extremely difficult to piece together much easier to trace.

A British photographer has won this year’s Bird Photographer of the Year with a rather spectacular shot of a northern gannet diving through the sea off Shetland.

Henley Spiers beat more than 24,000 entries with Sunball Rocket, which captures the bird underwater just after it has plunged through the surface, with the sun directly behind it.

The prize is £3,000. No word on the gannet’s cut.

Have a great day.

See you tomorrow.

We're independent, completely free and rely on readers spreading the word to grow. So if you have a friend who'd enjoy five minutes of news without all the noise, forward this email their way. It genuinely helps.

And if you're that friend, hello. You can subscribe here.