A NATIONAL newspaper has apologised to City of York Council, after printing a story which wrongly claimed the authority had banned hot cross buns from city schools for religious reasons.

In the article, in the Sunday Telegraph, it was claimed that the council, along with local authorities in Tower Hamlets, Liverpool, Wolverhampton, Wakefield and Birmingham, had taken the Easter treats off school menus because they could be "offensive" to non-Christians.

The claims, which were repeated in other national newspapers and radio programmes, were made even though the council's press office told the Sunday Telegraph, four days before it ran the article, that the suggestions were unfounded.

Yesterday, the Sunday Telegraph printed an apology over the March 16 story, which had been entitled "Hot cross banned: councils decree buns could be 'offensive' to non-Christians".

It read: "The councils concerned have asked us to point out that none of them has an official policy on hot cross buns and that their councillors have never discussed banning hot cross buns, nor have they ever instructed council caterers not to serve hot cross buns in schools.

"Where council catering managers were quoted as saying that hot cross buns were not being served, for whatever reason, this was not as a consequence of any council policy. We apologise for any confusion."

At the time the article was printed, the authority condemned the claims as "nonsense", and said that although hot cross buns were not being served at schools, it was not for any particular reason.

Patrick Scott, City of York Council's director of education, wrote to Sunday

Telegraph editor Dominic Lawson earlier this month demanding an apology.

Mr Scott said today: "We are happy to accept and now consider that to be the end of the matter as far as the Sunday Telegraph is concerned. "However, we hope that other news organisations which repeated the Sunday Telegraph's story as fact without checking with us first will now also be big enough to apologise."

Mr Scott stressed that the original article had upset people both inside and outside York, across the ethnic and religious spectrum.

Updated: 11:09 Monday, April 14, 2003