HTSS: A novel hybrid text summarisation and simplification architecture

•This paper presents a new hybrid loss function that enables the text summarisation model to generate easy-to-read simplified summaries.•A new evaluation measure for the combined tasks of summarisation and simplification has been proposed.•A novel parallel corpus of 5204 articles with their associated summarised simplified text for the combined task of text summasization and simplification has been provided for future research.•The proposed hybrid approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art neural text simplification and abstractive text summarisation models by 38.94% and 53.40%, respectively.