THE BBC denied last night that it responded to pressure from the Conservatives and altered this Sunday’s Panorama documentary on crime in Britain to avert a political row.

An early draft of script, obtained by The Times, showed that the documentary concluded that, on every measure, crime in Britain was falling, blowing a hole in one of Michael Howard’s central attacks on Tony Blair.

After frantic exchanges between Tory campaign headquarters and the BBC yesterday, including a detailed two-page e-mail from Tory researchers, this conclusion has been removed, according to a new script completed yesterday.

Panorama, which spent a month with West Yorkshire police making the documentary, analysed all the available data on crime in an attempt to see which party was telling the truth on the issue.

In the early draft, the programme ends with a conclusion that crime has fallen under Labour. “The most authoritative sources all tell the same story. The chief police officers, the British Crime Survey and the latest recorded crime statistics all show total crime has fallen,” it says.

The BBC played down the significance of the change. “The programme has been lengthened to expand and clarify a very complicated issue,” it said. “Scripts go through many changes in the production process to ensure absolute impartiality and accuracy. We stand by the journalism of the programme.”

Crime is one of the central issues of the election campaign. Panorama points out that Labour made extensive changes to the way crime is measured when it came to power in 1997.

The programme-makers have inserted the Tory view that even when all the changes are taken into account, violent crime has risen 46.5 per cent between 1998 and 2003 and that total crime has gone up by 4 per cent in the past five years.

Panorama has retained comments from senior police chiefs that they consider the true picture to be one of falling crime.

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