Transcript: What happened next?

NB: THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A TRANSCRIPTION UNIT RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT: BECAUSE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF MIS-HEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY, IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS ACCURACY.

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PANORAMA
What Happened Next?
RECORDED FROM TRANSMISSION: BBC ONE
DATE: 16:07:07

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JEREMY VINE: Hello, I'm Jeremy Vine and this is Panorama. The midwives under pressure.

HAYLEY: She's crying.

MIDWIFE: Who's crying?

HAYLEY: The woman's who's waiting for the bed.

MIDWIFE: Go tell her to get a life.

VINE: The two taxi drivers whose paths never crossed.

DRIVER: We're living two different lives here, aren't we.

VINE: And the reporter who lost the plot.

REPORTER JOHN SWEENEY: You listen to me! You were not there!

VINE: Just some of the stories that Panorama has brought you already this year. But once the dust has settled does anything change, or do things just roll on in the same old way? Tonight we'll find out as we go back to these stories and more, and reveal what happened next.

MIDWIVES UNDER COVER 3rd May 2007

VINE: Having a baby can be the most stressful time in a woman's life. But, as we discovered, too often the support they need just isn't there. Despite record spending on the health service midwives are overworked, and in some cases mothers and babies are being neglected. Panorama journalist Hayley Cutts went undercover in two maternity units as an untrained, unqualified volunteers. At St Mary's Hospital in Manchester she was asked to operate a foetal heart monitor.

HAYLEY: Oh right, okay. Do I have to look for anything.

No, just keep the heartbeat there and the green light? if it goes to red you've lost it and it'll go blank anyway.

VINE: At Barnet Hospital in London Hayley saw a woman in labour left in a corridor.

HAYLEY: We haven't got a bed for you yet, but I'm moving people round so soon you should have a bed. Okay?

VINE: Concerned for the woman Hayley went to the stressed midwife in charge.

HAYLEY: She's crying out there.

MIDWIFE: Sorry?

HAYLEY: She's crying.

MIDWIFE: Who's crying?

HAYLEY: The woman who's waiting for the bed.

MIDWIFE: Go tell her just get a life.

VINE: The midwife did try to find a bed 20 minutes later, but the woman waited 50 minutes in the corridor before she got one. Our programme provoked a huge response.

HAYLEY CUTTS Undercover reporter

After the programme went out we got thousands of calls and emails from people all over the country. From mums who had suffered in hospital, from midwives who were just struggling to cope, and from midwives who had actually given up because they just can't do their jobs properly.

VINE: Few doubt the dedication of midwives, but their union is talking about strike action for the first time in 125 years.

Dame KARLENE DAVIS Royal College of Midwives

Maternity services in England are under great strain at the moment. The birth rate has escalated, there are more complex births, and midwives are providing that service through sheer dedication, goodwill, and hard work. And this is unsustainable. If the government doesn't issue some direction soon then we will be heading to a crisis in the maternity services.

VINE: We saw first hand just how short staffed the maternity unit was at Barnet.

MIDWIFE 1: So I'll have to hand these ladies over to you because I have to go. I have to go.

MIDWIFE 2: And I've now got 14 patients.

MIDWIFE 1: Who else do I hand them over to?

MIDWIFE 2: There's no-one to hand them over to, this is the issue.. This is a daily occurrence. That's why no-one wants to be a midwife.

VINE: Well I went back to Barnet to find out whether anything had changed.

Are you getting more midwives? That's the crunch question here isn't it?

AVERIL DONGWORTH Chief Executive Barnet & Chase Farm NHS Trust

We will be getting more midwives from the 1st of July. And as I said that's because we are actually getting more work. 700 extra births last year.

VINE: Would you have got them if it wasn't for our programme?

AVERIL: I think we would have got them eventually. What your programme initiated was a visit by the Healthcare Commission, and the Healthcare Commission, as I said, have given us a clean bill of health but have said in their view there are some staffing issues that we need to look at.

VINE: And St Mary's in Manchester say they have now nearly reached their target of 188 full time midwives. They're actively recruiting to get that number. They say their midwives continue to work to the highest of standards.

TV's DIRTY SECRETS 23rd April 2007

VINE: We put TV on trial when we looked into premium rate phone in quizzes and allegations that viewers had been taken for a ride.

Richard and Judy Channel 4

JUDY: It seems some callers have not been properly entered into the competition.

Richard Madeley Obviously....

JUDY: We're very sorry, really.

VINE: Our investigations came after apologies across the channels, including the BBC. We uncovered a multi million pound fraud on GMTV that had gone on for nearly 4 years. Opera Interactive Technology, the company which ran their phone-ins, had been picking finalists early. Thousands of people had been charged to take part in competitions they couldn't win.

GMTV TODAY

GMTV knew nothing of this and is shocked to hear of these allegations.

VINE: So are we still getting conned, or are they playing fair?

ANY DREAM WILL DO .... and your vote will be counted and you will be charged.

VINE: These days they have to warn us to make sure we don't waste our money.

THIS MORNING If you are entering today's competition don't forget that the lines close at 12:15 which is, I think, just happening now. So if you try to call after that time you may still be charged, and you're not stupid so you're not going to do that are you?

VINE: When we broke the news GMTV reacted quickly. They sacked Opera.

Courtesy of GMTV 26th April 2007

PAUL CORLEY Managing Director, GMTV

We will do everything in our power to ensure that people get a refund and get reimbursed.

VINE: GMTV say they haven't refunded viewers yet as they're waiting for the outcome of their own investigation. Channel 4 dropped their phone-in competition on Richard and Judy and it also offered viewers a refund. Any unclaimed money is going to charity. A fortnight ago Echo, the firm that ran the 'You Say, We Pay' phone lines for Richard and Judy were fined a record £150,000 by the watchdog ICSTIS, and the case was referred on to the TV regulator OFCOM for further investigation. And last Monday, for the first time ever, OFCOM fined the BBC. The penalty £50,000 for faking a phone-in winner on children's favourite Blue Peter. Now a story of 3 murders. One that may have got the wrong man, one that never was, and one which came straight from an Ian Fleming novel.

HOW TO POISON A SPY

VINE: Russian journalist Alexander Litvinenko was killed by radioactive poison dropped in his tea in a London hotel. It was an agonising death.

MARINA LITVINENKO Wife of Alexander

Every day you could see he became worse. Every day it was fight for life. I tried to protect him, to say Sasha it just couldn't happened. I mean you see I never spoke about death, never.

VINE: We followed the trail of the radioactive polonium 210 and discovered evidence that pointed not to one but to multiple attempts to kill him. And we named ex-KGB officer Andrei Lugovoi as prime suspect. Last month the UK requested Lugovoi's extradition from Russia to stand trial for Litvinenko's murder. Lugovoi denies being the killer, and the Russians refuse to extradite him. But they now say they might put him on trial for the murder in Russia.

MURDER AT THE WORLD CUP 30th April 2007

VINE: In March Pakistani cricket coach Bob Woolmer was found dead in his hotel room. Within days it had become a murder hunt and dominated the headlines. Panorama went inside Deputy Police Commissioner Mark Shields' investigation.

MARK SHIELDS: There was some difficulty in getting the door all the way back.

HOTEL STAFF: So when the chambermaid came in this door was basically wedged..

SHIELDS: It was wedged by his body.

VINE: The initial pathologists report found that he'd been strangled and asphyxiated. Toxicology reports found poison. Last month Jamaican police announced they'd got it wrong. The poison was in fact only weed killer from years on the cricket pitch, and Woolmer had died of natural causes. Adam Parsons reported the climb down on the news that night, and went back to see Mark Shields.

People are going to say that this turn around is an embarrassment to the Jamaican police force. Do you agree?

MARK SHIELDS Deputy Commissioner Jamaican Police Force

I don't think that I have anything personally to be ashamed of, or indeed that the force has to be ashamed of. As I've said we have conducted an investigation thoroughly, we've kept an open mind, and we have done that on a backdrop of the world's media looking at us.

How do you think this inquiry will now affect people's perception of the Jamaican police force?

SHIELDS: Good police officers are professional, they are open, and we often reflect and are very critical of ourselves and each other. That's the whole point of a review system, that at an early stage if an investigation isn't going the way that you think it should one should never be arrogant enough to continue down that particular path.

JILL DANDO'S MURDER THE NEW EVIDENCE 5th September 2006

VINE: From the murder that wasn't to a jailed murderer who may be innocent.

WOMAN CALLER: Hello ambulance. I'm walking along Gowan Avenue. It looks like there's somebody collapsed, and confidentially it looks like it's Jill Dando.

[NEWS] BBC television presenter Jill Dando has been murdered outside her London home.

Police interview footage

Did you kill Jill Dando?

BARRY GEORGE: No sir.

VINE: Barry George, now 6 years into a life sentence for the murder of Jill Dando, has always protested his innocence.

Police interview footage

What was your interest in Jill Dando?

GEORGE: I don't have an interest in Jill Dando sir.

VINE: The only forensic evidence against him was a single microscopic particle of firearm residue. It was found in a coat pocket more than a year after the murder. The prosecution claimed it was compelling evidence.

Police interview footage

The inside pocket of your coat has been found to have a trace of percussion primer discharge residue. Did you kill Jill Dando Mr George?

GEORGE: No sir.

VINE: Reporter Raphael Rowe took the case files to Italy, and one of the world's leading firearms forensic experts. His conclusion was definite.

PROF. MORIN: (Laughs) This kind of evidence should not have been used in the trial in my opinion.

VINE: Professor Morin reviewed the evidence and concluded the particle might not have been firearm residue.

Professor MARCO MORIN Firearms forensic expert

Finding a particle with such a high peak of aluminium and only barium with traces of lead, and I'm not sure it's all lead, probably the results of some sulphur in it, doesn't make it a particle from a gunshot.

VINE: Recently the Criminal Cases Review Commission referred Barry George's case back to the court of appeal saying the single speck had been given too much significance at his trial. And we've learnt the forensic science service has now decided that in future single particles will not be submitted as evidence in firearms cases.

Police interview footage

Did you kill Jill Dando?

GEORGE: No sir.

WHITE FRIGHT 7th May 2007

VINE: Panorama went to Blackburn to map a community split down the middle. We found a town where some whites feel so ill at ease with their Muslim neighbours they're taking flight. And no-one was talking about why. Vivian White went back to find our if they're talking now.

VIVIAN WHITE: Mohammed Nawaz, a Muslim, is a Blackburn minicab driver. His firm's based near Whalley Range, an Asian area, and all the drivers at Adam's private hire are Asians like himself.

MOHAMMED NAWAZ We're living two different lives here aren't we? Until something's done to bring both communities together we're just going to grow apart and it's going to get worse.

WHITE: Blackburn Rovers supporters aren't exclusively white, but they're hugely in the majority. Ian Goodliffe's a season ticket holder. He's a minicab driver too. The firm he works for is based in Mill Hill, a white area, and all the drivers in his firm are white as well. We tried a simple experiment.

I want to give you this. If you plug this in there's a tracker on the end of this. It'll see where you go and it'll give us some idea of what you do.

Would their passengers, white and Muslim Asian, get together, or would they stay apart? Would the two communities ever head for the same destination? Would their paths ever cross? And the result of our tracker experiment? Our two minicab drivers and their passengers shared the town centre, otherwise their journeys hardly crossed. We wanted to know how our portrait of their town had gone down, especially as we'd argued that Blackburn was just a stark example of a problem that exists in lots of other places too. So we went back to meet our two cabbies to get the word on the street from their passengers. First Mohammed Nawaz.

MOHAMMED NAWAZ: They came out with different comments. It was, you know, that we should integrate a little bit more, maybe some of the things they do, all of us do, are wrong.

WHITE: And then his fellow cabbie, Ian Goodliffe.

IAN GOODLIFFE Quite a lot of people thought you got it right. Those that didn't seemed to think you were biased, but it depended on who you were talking to as to who they thought you were biased towards. Talk to a white guy they thought you were biased towards the Asians, and if you talked to an Asian guy they thought you were biased towards the whites. So it was? but it did actually get people talking.

WHITE: Have you ever met the other driver?

GOODLIFFE: No, no. I've seen him on the road, you know, and we've waved and that. But no, I've never met him.

WHITE: I think we should get you together with Mohammed.

GOODLIFFE: Yes.

WHITE: So we did. We all met up in the town centre, the only part of Blackburn where their routes had crossed.

Mohammed, meet Ian Goodliffe, driver of the black cab, meet Mohammed Nawaz driver of the white cab. How much time have you ever spent with a white minicab driver Mohammed before today?

MOHAMMED NAWAZ: Not a lot.

WHITE; Not a lot meaning none?

NAWAZ: None.

WHITE: Should we leave these subjects well alone because discussing them might upset the horses?

IAN GOODLIFFE: No, no, I don't think we should. I think it's best to talk about it.

NAWAZ: I think whatever differences we have I think we should carpet together, you know, there shouldn't be a gap in it.

WHITE: But for the local community to get together that means that you Mohammed have to get together with you Ian.

NAWAZ: Yeah.

WHITE: You're going to be less afraid of living with each other, less afraid of talking about your differences.

GOODLIFFE: Yes, we do need to. But I think it's got to come not just from local cabbies, it's got to come from everyone.

GO GREEN OR ELSE! 5th March 2007

VINE: Meet the Rowlatts. First we took away their car, then their cheap holidays, and asked them to spend a year living ethically. When the year was up they'd cut their carbon footprint by over 20%. So 4 months on are the Rowlatts sticking to the environmental straight and narrow?

JUSTIN ROWLATT Reporter

It doesn't look good. I know what you're thinking, but there's a good reason why I'm driving the car again, and that's because we're on our way to a very important event. The Glastonbury festival. And although there's a good line up we're not here for the bands, or for the pies, and certainly not for the mud. Well I'm here as an honoured guest of the festival itself to share my experiences of ethical living here at the speaker's forum.

[Speaking at the Festival] I suppose the most surprising thing was as soon as you've embraced the idea that you have to change then it is actually quite easy to make quite profound changes in your life. So in terms of what ordinary people can do that's simple and really works do change the light bulbs in your home, do turn things off standby. And we saw our electricity consumption went down by 22%.

Because we're sticking to almost everything. The energy saving bulbs, the recycling, the lot. We've saved so much money doing it it'd be stupid not to. I know, you're still wondering about the car aren't you? Well we still don't have a car at home. We only borrowed this one to come up to Glastonbury. And because there are so many of us, 5 people, in it, it works out the same carbon cost as public transport.

SEX CRIMES AND THE VATICAN 1st October 2006

VINE: At the end of last year we revealed evidence that the Vatican has operated a policy of secrecy over allegations of the sexual abuse of thousands of children by priests worldwide. This is Father Oliver O'Grady, a former Catholic priest. The church knew he was a child abuser.

PROSECUTION: How about how you would greet that little girl you were grooming? Just use the name Sally.

O'GRADY: Hi Sally, how you doing? Come here, I wanna give you a hug. You're a sweetheart you know that. You're very special to me.

VINE: Instead of reporting O'Grady the church hid him from the authorities. No mistake, but part of a secret church directive which bans the abused child, priests, and any witnesses from talking about what happened. The Vatican denies the directive was ever meant to be used in this way. The man responsible for enforcing it was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now the head of the Catholic Church, Pope Benedict the 16th. Just last month our film was broadcast on Italian TV. It was the first time the media there had dared level such accusations at the Vatican. It caused enormous controversy in this Catholic country, bitterly dividing Italian politicians and the public.

ALBERTO NERAZZINI Italian Journalist

It was very, very tough to screen the film. And of course the discussion became public and the church was really upset and really tried anyway to stop the broadcasting of the documentary.

VINE: This studio debate followed the broadcast.

Silence, silence, that's the word we keep coming back to here.

The Vatican took part.

Bishop RINO FISICHELLA Vatican representative

These are crimes of the most awful kind. There can be no, and there is no, code of silence. There can be no complacency, there can be no hiding of the facts.

VINE: Italians abused as children by priests spoke for the first time.

MARIANGELA ACCORDI I was 10 years old, it was right after my first communion, 1972 or 1973, I'm not sure exactly because basically it was throughout my adolescence and childhood.

FISICHELLA: The church is not ashamed, I'm sorry. The one who should be ashamed is that priest, who should not be a priest now, and who should never have been a priest in the first place.

VINE: The broadcast of our programme in Italy led to the Vatican offering the hope of justice to the victims.

NERAZZINI: Bishop Fisichella promised to some victims that were inside the studio that the Vatican will investigate and will take care of the.. of all these people abused. And this is a promise, so they have to.. we have to follow that promise.

EXPOSED: THE BAIL HOSTEL SCANDAL 8th November 2006

VINE: There comes a time when even some of the most dangerous offenders are freed from jail. Some are released into the care of bail hostels, where they're monitored and supervised in order to protect the rest of us. Our undercover investigation painted a very different picture as Paul Kenyon found out.

PAUL KENYON: There are 2,000 people living in bail hostels across the UK. They include high risk offenders, rapists, and murderers being rehabilitated back into the community. Our undercover reporter Luke Mendham worked for 5 months in two bail hostels in Bristol. Frank was one of the friendlier residents. One afternoon he told Luke why he was there.

FRANK: I got charged with murder, I killed somebody and I shouldn't have done. I don't like talking about it.

KENYON: And no wonder, his victim was a 10 year old girl. Frank was released after serving 39 years in jail. He would stay free only if he kept away from children. But as Luke discovered, once residents have signed out for the day, there's no way staff can know what they're up to. For a short time we put him under surveillance. Here's Frank Parker. Hostel staff have no idea where he is but we do. Alone with a girl who appears to be in her early teens. We called the police and kept watching him. A month later he was still out and about, still befriending children. Parker was later recalled to prison, not because of his behaviour we were told, but because our broadcast might make him abscond.

PAUL KENYON After our programme the Home Secretary demanded an enquiry into what we'd found. It questioned whether Frank Parker should have been freed from prison in the first place. It also criticised some staff for not doing their job properly, and said that the public hadn't been protected from Frank Parker. Frank Parker's still behind bars, but our film revealed problems with the system that at the time the Home Office promised to address. So has anything changed?

HARRY FLETCHER National Association of Probation Officers In terms of the inspectorates findings on training, experienced staff, security, nothing has really changed at all, and I think that hostel staff remain of the view that they're chronically under-funded and are faced with probably the most difficult job within the justice system.

SCIENTOLOGY AND ME

VINE: When Panorama investigate sometimes heads roll. At other times not very much happens, at least in public. But every now and then, as John Sweeney discovered when he took on Scientology, the people being investigated bite back.

JOHN SWEENEY: My mission; to find out whether the church of Scientology still deserves its sinister reputation. We tried to negotiate access with a church but couldn't reach agreement. We'd been talking to their critics and they knew it, and then the man we'd been negotiating with was waiting for us at our hotel at midnight, church spokesman Tommy Davis.

Hello, hi.

TOMMY DAVIS: I have nothing to shake hands with you on.

SWEENEY: Okay.

DAVIS: Yeah, I find it considerably obnoxious what you've done.

SWEENEY: The man in black the Scientology cameraman.

(to Davis) From my perspective you, and you, and the church of Scientology, have been spying on the BBC.

It was the first of many confrontations. Who should pop up the next day?

TOMMY DAVIS: Afternoon.

SWEENEY: Oh hi Tommy. Hello. Hi, hello, how are you? I was just wondering where you are, and there you are, fantastic.

Then I used the word 'cult'.

DAVIS DAVIS Spokesperson, Church of Scientology

Now you listen to me for a second. You have no right whatsoever to say what and what isn't a religion.

SWEENEY: And up pops Tommy again. It's Tommy Davis.

DAVIS: I just wanted to make sure that we were on record, you know, as far as.. you know, this gentleman here that you're with?

SWEENEY: Every time we talk to a critic of Scientology you, within hours, come up and say "that's an extortionist, that's a sexual pervert." It's as if you are terrified of anyone criticising your organisations. It's as if there's something that you've got to hide.

DAVIS: I am not terrified of anything and you know what I have absolutely nothing to hide whatsoever, zero.

SWEENEY: Hiding from Tommy wasn't easy.

JOHN SWEENEY Reporter

[speaking from the loo] We're just having a kind of editorial conference in the loo because it's the only place where we can go to escape from them.

DAVIS: Are you guys doing okay in there?

SWEENEY: Yeah, we're just?

DAVIS: All 3 of you are in the bathroom together?

SWEENEY: Yeah, well the point is Tommy is that..

DAVIS: Is that okay?

SWEENEY: It's fine.

Then came the showdown. Tommy Davis launched into me yet again for the uncritical way he believed I'd interviewed one of Scientology's critics, and I lost it - big time.

DAVIS: You're accusing members of my religion of engaging in brainwashing?

SWEENEY: No Tommy, you shut up! (shouting) No, listen to me. You were not there at the beginning of that interview!!!

I apologised then and I apologise now, it was wrong and I'd let my team down. Unsurprisingly Scientology use their recording of my meltdown against me. They compared me to Hitler, accused us of faking evidence and being linked to terrorism, charges we deny. Then I went global. My rage spread across the world like a computer virus. Scientology moved the battle to the internet. They posted their recording of Mr Shouty. We fired back showing the context, and reported what Scientology's critics say, that it's a cult. Battle joined, the YouTube generation got stuck in.

MATT HAWES You Tuber

There's just something funny to me about a respected journalist who loses his cool during an interview, especially when he's an investigative journalist. So we decided we were going to make a video spoofing it.

[Action replay of meltdown]

It had nothing to do with Scientology, because neither one of us are Scientologists. He (his puppet colleague) might be a puppet but he's not a Scientologist.

SWEENEY: And so it spreads, jumping oceans and time zones. Two million hits on YouTube and counting. Scientologists got some support.

This is a professional, not. Look at his face turned red like a tomato when he starts yelling.

Crikey, that guy's nuts.

Like a big red zit that someone should pop.

SWEENEY: But, to my surprise, I got more.

John Sweeney, freaking legend.

Sweeney is my hero.

SWEENEY: A new generation is making up its own mind about Scientology, and for that I make no apology.

VINE: John Sweeney, who scares the living daylights out of me. We'll continue to keep tabs on what happens next, and there'll be a further update programme before the end of the year.

Next week join us as we look at immigration, how we lost count, a town that's bursting at the seams with new arrivals that officially don't exist.

___________ bbc.co.uk/panorama