Ordinarily, we're pretty used to these sorts of claims, part of the political rough and tumble. We regularly receive calls from both Mr Osborne's team and the opposition very keen that we more heavily report this or that statistic, or de-emphasise a particular figure that is less helpful to their stance.

However, Mr Osborne was public in his criticism of how we are doing and chose to give three concrete examples of where he thought we had gone wrong. We feel it merits a response.

1) Mr Osborne claimed that comments made recently by the OECD's chief economist Pier Carlo Padoan, which seemed to suggest the UK might have to change its deficit reduction strategy if growth stayed weak, had been over-interpreted by the BBC.

In actual fact, it was our judgement that these comments had indeed been over-interpreted elsewhere in the media and we made a conscious decision, after an early report, not to report the comments prominently on any of our outlets throughout the day and that evening.

You can read our online piece on the story here and see if you agree it has over-interpreted Mr Padoan's comments as the chancellor asserted.

2) Secondly, Mr Osborne claimed that, after listening to BBC output for the last year, he had yet to hear a single item that large numbers of jobs had been created.

In fact, had the chancellor been listening carefully to Today just an hour earlier (he seemed to suggest he had been but may have missed it) he would have heard our economics editor Stephanie Flanders say clearly that over the last year employment has been very strong and that private employment was especially strong.

Viewers of our main Six and Ten O'Clock News bulletins will know that virtually every single time we report unemployment figures we also give the employment figure for fairness and balance.

It's also worth noting that in our heavily read online coverage we have reported on at least seven job creation stories in just the last few of weeks. Here are a couple of those as examples of this.

3) Finally, the chancellor observed that we only report manufacturing surveys which are disappointing and gave the example of a disappointing Markit survey last week and today's more positive Engineering Employers Federation survey.

In reality, we gave very little coverage last week to a set of three Markit surveys, including one showing the manufacturing sector grew at its weakest pace in almost two years in May. On the other hand we have indeed covered the EEF survey today. There are a large number of market surveys and data each day and we attempt to make the best judgement we can about the editorial strength of the story.

At this point I should say we don't always get it right. Sometimes we may over-emphasise or under-emphasise something. That always ensures a lively and valuable editorial discussion in the newsroom. Very occasionally we may miss something interesting completely, though we'll try to catch up as soon as we realise.

While we understand the political context around all our business and economics reporting, our sole purpose is to report and put context around the data for the benefit of all our audiences, reflecting that there are differing points of view and analysis which may occasionally make uncomfortable reading from both sides of the political divide.

Jeremy Hillman is editor of the BBC News business and economics unit.

Jeremy Hillman is editor of the BBC News business and economics unit.

There's no doubt it's growing in importance as evidenced by an increasing number of makes and models and changing consumer attitudes. That was the reason behind our idea to set our correspondent Brian Milligan a challenge this week - to drive an electric car from London to Scotland using only public charging points.

I'm delighted to say it's already drawing quite a following on our website as well as on our Facebook page and Twitter feed and a lot of you are engaging with our little adventure. We've even had a class from Preston School in Eaglescliffe, Stockton-on-Tees, coming along to see the car and find out about the environmental issues of electric motoring.

Of course, as Brian acknowledged in his opening piece, the challenge could be a seen as a little unfair. Many electric cars are designed more for short commuter runs than a journey of the sort we're attempting but we're not making any great scientific claims for this, rather we're hoping to bring the issues about electric cars and their infrastructure to the widest possible audience and we seem to be doing that.

However, I hear that our project has a challenger and a rival electric sports car has now set off from London in pursuit! For those of who haven't yet seen the coverage please do feel free to follow our progress here.

It's a story which provoked high emotions. Not only do many of you bank with RBS as individuals and businesses but we all, as taxpayers, own a very large chunk of the bank - 84 % to be exact.

One of the ways we were able to cover both sides of the story was the willingness of the RBS boss Stephen Hester to be held accountable. Through interviews on the BBC he was able to speak to his customers and shareholders - you may not agree with what he had to say but he laid out a reasoned and coherent case for his actions. You can see one of his interviews here.

There's another bank in which we all have a major stake (41% in this case) and which owes its existence to support from all of us. Lloyds has announced its results this morning. It too has made big losses and its share price sits well below what we taxpayers paid for our stake.

The BBC has been asking Lloyds bosses for interviews but so far they don't feel the need to answer our questions or explain their plans for taxpayers to get their money back.

Lloyds CEO Eric Daniels - the only boss of a rescued UK bank to keep his job throughout the crisis - and on a salary of more than £1m - doesn't seem to feel the same responsibility to be accountable as his opposite number at RBS. If you do have questions you'd like to put to Eric Daniels or the Lloyds Chairman Sir Win Bischoff, then please write them here and we'll keep asking and hope they change their minds.

PS. Robert Peston has written a post about Lloyds' latest figures.

Jeremy Hillman is editor of the BBC News business and economics unit.

The sudden and shocking collapse of one of the most well-known financial institutions in the world marked a seminal moment and triggered a dramatic meltdown in global finance which has left the world a different place from the one it was 12 months ago. Its aftershocks have had implications for all of us.

After Lehman's, the global economy ceased to expand for the first time in 60 years with poor countries severely hit by the fall in commodity prices and remittances. The crisis is estimated to have thrown an additional 100 million people into absolute poverty (earning less than a dollar a day).

In the UK household, wealth has fallen by around £1.1 trillion - or around £40,000 per household. Government debt is expected to reach £1 trillion in a few years, an increase of £600 billion, and unemployment is expected to top three million, or 10% of the workforce. The crisis has also led to unprecedented international co-operation at the G20 summit in London and later this month in Pittsburgh, which could lead to stronger regulation of the world's financial markets, including bankers' bonuses.

So what are we hoping to achieve in our coverage over the next few days and weeks? Firstly, with the perspective of a little time, we will ask what caused the crash and whether it's possible to design a system to prevent a future repeat. We will look at the current state of the global economy, at whether the crisis has fundamentally altered the power balance within that economy away from the US. And we'll also ask whether we are now in a recovery and what that recovery will look like.

A specially created area on our site will aggregate all the best of the journalism we are creating. There will be opportunities for you to participate in the discussion and debates, and you'll hear from our most authoritative voices including business editor Robert Peston and economics editor Stephanie Flanders, who will be speaking to all the main players from the world of business and finance. There may be no easy answers but we will do our best to ask the difficult questions.

We're coming to the end of a full week of reporting UK bank results which started with Barclays and HSBC, moved onto Northern Rock, then Lloyds-HBOS and today finished with RBS. We even had a surprise £50bn of quantitative easing thrown into the mix for good measure.

We've reported all this in a great deal of detail on radio and TV and online and they have all painted a mixed picture. It's clear that a lot of our audience members want some clear answers to some straightforward questions.
• Are the banks doing enough to support the economy?
• Are the worst of bank losses behind us?
• Is quantitative easing working?
• Where has all the money the taxpayer has put in actually gone?
• And when will we get it back?

Well, it's pretty tough to give definitive answers to those. If there's one thing confirmed by reporting this weeks results, it's that interpreting them is as much art as science.

For confirmation of that, you need only look at our reporting of today's RBS results, where we are reporting a broadly break-even £15m profit while others, including the FT, are reporting a £1bn loss (it depends whether you include the pre-tax post-exceptionals, and we had a lively debate about that ourselves).

Or you could look at how banks have chosen to report their business lending. RBS tell us that they have approved 85% of new loan requests (down from 86%). Barclays claim a figure of 90% approval for loan applications from credit-worthy businesses - spot the difference?

What we have tried to do this week is to extract the meaning and find the story in each of this week's results, and I'd urge you to take a look at Robert Peston's blog posts throughout this week to get the best picture we can provide.

One thing that would have helped this week is if the chief wxecutives of Northern Rock and Lloyds-HBOS - banks in which we as taxpayers have a huge interest - had been willing to speak to us. They could help with the answers to the many of the questions you are rightly asking.

Jeremy Hillman is editor of the business and economics unit.

One of issues mentioned by Ray Snoddy was the number of audience comments asking why the website's top story on Monday 16 February was about the 850 jobs being lost at BMW's Mini plant at Cowley, whilst the smaller story just underneath was the creation of 9,000 jobs by KFC.

Some have taken that as proof we are always keener to report and highlight the bad news. In fact we had a detailed editorial discussion about this on Monday and I believe we made the right choice on journalistic grounds, though I can fully see the argument both ways.

The jobs being created by KFC are over a three to five-year period, the jobs being lost at Cowley were immediate and entailed stories of human pain and shock. The wider story of the car industry, and the political debate surrounding it, was deemed by us to be more newsworthy at this moment than the also interesting phenomenon of "value" food chains doing pretty well in the recession (McDonalds has also had a good story to tell recently).

In the end we had to make a judgement call, but it's never just a case of us deciding to put the "bad news" first.

We've assembled a large team of independent financial advisors and together with the BBC's own team of personal finance and business experts we're offering advice and finding out what's most important to people now we've entered what could be a steep recession.

Already we've been broadcasting live on Breakfast, the News Channel, BBC2's Working Lunch and Radios 4 / 5live as well as local and regional radio and television. You can see a lot of what's being generated on our Money Matters website which has been constructed specially for today.

Of course the range of problems and issues people have is wide but what's struck me is that all day the longest queue has been for "savings and investment" advice.

Across the age range people are most anxious about what to do with the money they have. That's both in terms of getting a return for it, and, even more importantly for many, keeping it safe.

Of course, the answer is not straightforward and a lot depends on whether we're heading for a long period of deflation, or conversely high inflation in a couple of years time. You can find economists who passionately hold each of those points of view (there's a surprise).

Please do have a look at the site and enter our money quiz. I got 8/10 right which isn't great for the business and economics editor.

There's no doubt that a proportion of audiences for TV and radio, and here online, feel that the BBC is just too gloomy in its reporting of the economy. Some of you feel that the coverage is just relentlessly downbeat and while you don't question its accuracy, you tell us that it's just a switch-off and that you've heard it all before. Others, even more worryingly, feel that our reporting is positively undermining confidence and has actively contributed to the situation we're in.

On the first question, whether we're just too gloomy: it's something that we're acutely aware of and which we regularly discuss. It's a concern which has been shaping our coverage in different ways. A simple example may illustrate.

It's clear that reporting every single house price survey that comes across our desks, can, by simple dint of repetition, create an overall impression of a picture more gloomy that it is. For instance, if we report a 2% house price fall three times in one month from different organisations, it may be completely accurate. Yet some regular viewers will take away the impression that house prices are falling much more steeply, assaulted week after week by essentially the same story.

For that reason, we are very choosy about which surveys and statistics to report and we plan our coverage more broadly than a simple "on-the-day" reaction. Similarly, our "downturn" graphics with the plunging red arrow have attracted some criticism. Seen once or twice, they have a far milder effect than constant repetition many times a day over a period of weeks or months. That visual power and the reinforcing effect of repetition is something we've taken into account in designing our new "recession" branding which began today.

We've also made real efforts to reflect the nuanced picture of the economy. We understand that many people are unaffected by this recession and that some have even benefited. You can see some examples of the variety of coverage here and here. Only yesterday, we widely reported gas price cuts which will benefit millions.

Secondly, the allegation that our coverage has somehow contributed to the worsening economic conditions. It's a that view I reject, but I'm not going to pretend that we do our journalism in a total vacuum.

Clearly, confidence plays a part in any economy. Yet I don't believe that accurate and factual coverage, of the sort we provide, does anything other than help people make sensible, rational judgements about their own economic behaviour. The UK is in the midst of global financial crisis and financial reporting can surely have had nothing to do with governments around the world being forced to inject trillions of dollars into their banking systems?

The BBC has a duty to accurately report and reflect the facts and statistics of the UK economy in a proportionate and measured way and I believe we do that to the best of our ability. Our audiences would not expect us to talk up the economy any more than they would want us to talk it down.

Jeremy Hillman is editor of the business and economics unit.

The theme of the assembly was choice and personal responsibility and the kids all did brilliantly with readings about a wise man and foolish man and a song to finish. Then the headmaster talked to the whole school about the origins of the global financial crisis. Not surprisingly there were no mentions of mortgage backed securities and collateralised debt obligations!

Instead, he talked to the children about personal responsibility, not spending more than you have, and about thinking about the consequences for the future of your decisions now. This Christmas, he told the children, you should decide what you can afford and stick to that - it was obviously a message too for all of us parents sitting at the back.

As we spend a lot of our broadcasting time discussing bank behaviour, corporate greed, and failures of regulation it did make me wonder if there is a simpler message we should be conveying more strongly in our coverage.

I suspect my son though will still want that remote control helicopter and damn the consequences.

The UK is more than likely heading for a recession - both the prime minister and the governor of the Bank of the England agree - and you'll hear that a lot in every BBC report today.

As viewers and listeners know we've been using the "R" word all week and for several months. It's ironic that just a few weeks ago some were criticising the BBC for being too pessimistic and "talking the economy down", and some still are.

As we all know in this business it's sometimes possible to get details wrong when you're on deadline, so I take no offence at the Telegraph calling me Hill rather than Hillman.

Firstly, it's reported today that the BBC has banned any reference to the term "crisis". Er, no, we haven't. It's true that tomorrow we're having a day devoted to taking the temperature of the economy around the UK and how it's affecting people, which we're calling "The Downturn". But that doesn't mean we're losing our financial crisis branding when we cover further bank or financial shocks and indeed we'll be using it even tomorrow on our international coverage.

Secondly, it's suggested we're using Downturn in place of the word "recession". Luckily anyone who has watched any of our output this week will know that one's wrong too. Both the prime minister and the governor of the Bank of England have said it's likely we're heading in to a recession and we're saying that in our reports too. In fact we've been reporting the possibility of a recession for months. So, why don't we label our day tomorrow "The Recession" and be done with it? Simply because we may well be in a recession but we won't get any official confirmation of that for a while yet. A recession is two quarters of negative growth and as soon as we're in one you'll hear it from us.

The criticism we're not being gloomy enough about the economy is well balanced by other criticism we've been getting that we're talking down the economy and being too pessimistic. I suppose we should comfort ourselves that we're getting criticism both ways which must put us in about the right place. What I do know for a fact is that our audiences to our radio, TV and online coverage have all grown significantly during this financial crisis (oops, banned word!) and I'd like to thank so many of you for turning to our coverage at this very unsettling time.

Meanwhile if you have a story to tell us about how the economy is affecting you please e-mail us at: bbc.co.uk/haveyoursay

The case for the prosecution seems to be that our reporting is irresponsible, scaremongering and is inflaming the situation by causing volatile share price movements. Additionally some believe Robert's reporting has been inaccurate based on the evidence that several banks denied formally applying to the Bank of England for cash.

Allow me to make the case for the defence. We have one primary responsibility and that is to you, our audience. Our decision to run a story is based on simple criteria. Is it accurate and would it be of significant interest and relevance to our audience? If the answer is yes then our presumption is to be publish unless there is a huge overriding interest not to.

We understand that our journalism does not exist in a vacuum, and that what we say may have consequences but it is not for us to sit in judgement and second guess those.

Of course, there are occasions when we do withold information. We are given some formal financial notifications early for logistical reasons with an agreed embargo time. When covering conflicts we will not give troop locations and movements which would put lives in danger. When we hear news of casualties in Iraq or Afghanistan we will hold the news until the next of kin have been informed.

Those life and death situations are the exception. The financial health of our banks do not fall into that category, indeed there is immense public interest in the free flow of information about them.

On the question of accuracy, I would ask you to read the words that Robert published which do not say the banks made a formal approach for cash. In the light of the announcement made by the government 24 hours later I believe there is only one conclusion.

The number of angles on this story from a business and economic perspective are huge and we're scrabbling to try and unscramble what it all means.

It's also triggered a huge inflow of e-mails asking what it means for you? Should you buy/sell/hold bank shares? Should you move money between accounts? Will this mean it's easier to get a mortgage or loan now? What about your pensions?

Your questions are really helping us to focus our coverage and pointing us in some interesting directions. We'll be trying to answer some of your questions in a special edition of Working Lunch on BBC2 at 1.30pm today presented by Declan Curry and Naga Munchetty.

If you can't catch it live please do watch it later on the iPlayer or log onto Declan's Working lunch blog. But above all please keep your questions and points coming and we'll do our best to investigate and answer them.

At one editorial meeting a programme editor joked we in the business unit were like undertakers at a funeral.

The truth is that this has been a dramatic, historic week for the global economy and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't enjoying the challenge and the adrenalin rush of covering these fast moving events.

At 9am on Wednesday I got a call from our business editor Robert Peston. He told me that Lloyds and HBOS were in advanced merger talks and he was going to break the story on the news channel as soon as possible.

It was dynamite information and only known by a handful of people intimately involved in the talks.

I broke the news to a hushed morning editorial meeting attended each day by all the BBC news editors at 9am.

Moments later Robert broke the news to the country and as he spoke live we could immediately see the markets move and HBOS shares start to climb.

It was an exhilarating feeling to be such a close bystander to such a unique and surprising event.

But whilst I will admit to enjoying the drama of rare moments like those, I'd like to think that none of us in the business unit ever lose sight of the real impact this economic story is having on people's lives.

That same day we covered widely the depressing news of rising unemployment in the UK.

The moment any of us stop doing that is the moment we're getting it wrong for our audiences.