- guardian.co.uk, Thursday 2 November 2000 18.18 GMT
The goverment yesterday accused the BBC of deliberate distortion in its reporting of the readiness of the NHS to cope with a winter crisis.
The prime minister's official spokesman, Alastair Campbell, forced its flagship Today programme to tone down claims that the NHS faces a more severe beds crisis than last year after insisting that the BBC's own hospital survey showed just the opposite.
In a foretaste of election tussles to come on a critical political battleground the Department of Health first intervened to protest about the way the survey was being reported after monitoring the earliest bulletins of the day on Radio 4.
After getting replies from 81 of the 123 UK health authorities the BBC concluded that 73 expected this winter to produce "the same or more pressure" on the NHS.
In fact 47 of the authorities had said it would be the same and 71 reported they were now "very or fairly confident" that they were better placed to deal with winter pressures.
The answers which justified the gloomy tone of the BBC's report - "most hospital administrators feel there are some very difficult months ahead" - came when 31 authorities said they expected to cancel non-urgent surgery (29 did not) and 22 said they expected greater pressure than last winter.
Though the Today programme stuck to its guns and interviewed both Dr Liam Fox, the Tory health spokesman and Nigel Crisp - on his first day as the NHS's new chief executive and Department of Health permanent secretary - the BBC's initial claims were qualified as the morning wore on.
Mr Crisp's officials had seen the survey overnight and he took it into the Today studio.
"I have got your survey in front of me which I must say I think is encouraging because it is saying that people are planning for winter," he declared. No 10 called the BBC line "an outrage".
By midday the BBC's website presented the survey in more emollient terms, with an opening paragraph revealing that "health authorities expect to face severe pressure this winter - but believe they will cope better this time around".
"It became less bad, but it was still wrong right up to 9 o'clock when it was being reported that the Department of Health spokesman was saying that 90% of health authorities questioned (71) thought they were better off, though it was actually their own survey which said that," said a senior health official.
"In effect they were reporting the positive news as if it was spin and spinning news that did not really exist. The substance of the survery was good, it was the BBC spin that was bad."
Downing Street remained angry.
Mr Campbell later fired off a letter of protest which was being studied at the BBC last night prior to a formal reply
No 10 wants an investigation of what Tony Blair's spokesman called "sad and totally unacceptable (behaviour) by the BBC's flagship programme" in seeking to copy the Tory tabloids in generating a sense of winter crisis again as the expected May election looms. The issue is hyper-sensitive to both sides at Westminster because the government has belatedly commited billions of extra cash to NHS reform and better delivery of services to sceptical voters.
The health secretary, Alan Milburn, on Tuesday signed a "concordat" with the private sector to buy their services for NHS patients. In his letter to Tony Hall, the BBC's chief executive, Mr Campbell complained that reporting that "highlights and over-dramatises selective information from surveys and which underplays other equally, if not more significant findings should have no place in BBC News".
