This has been covered here before.
No, it is not typographically acceptable to use a hyphen for a dash, but you have mischaracterized the issue. Those are spaced en dashes, which is just fine.
If you have only a typewriter, things get confused, but in properly typeset books, there is a world of difference.
This has been covered here before. You have to judge these things based on what they are doing, not on accidents of fontage.
They are being represented by U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS, but that is an accident of software and ambiguous data entry. They are functioning as dashes, so that is what they are. That’s like when you write a -3 for −3. You are still using what is functionally a minus sign, even if you have typed U+002D and nothing changed it to the preferred U+2122 MINUS SIGN code point.
Technically speaking, Unicode has 27 code points with the “Dash” character property. How they look will vary according to the font selected and the display software. Each of them has its own set of properties that help software determine what to do with line-breaks and such. These are the 27 Unicode Dash=Yes code points:
Code Glyph Name General Category
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
U+002D - HYPHEN-MINUS Dash_Punctuation
U+058A ֊ ARMENIAN HYPHEN Dash_Punctuation
U+05BE ־ HEBREW PUNCTUATION MAQAF Dash_Punctuation
U+1400 ᐀ CANADIAN SYLLABICS HYPHEN Dash_Punctuation
U+1806 ᠆ MONGOLIAN TODO SOFT HYPHEN Dash_Punctuation
U+2010 ‐ HYPHEN Dash_Punctuation
U+2011 ‑ NON-BREAKING HYPHEN Dash_Punctuation
U+2012 ‒ FIGURE DASH Dash_Punctuation
U+2013 – EN DASH Dash_Punctuation
U+2014 — EM DASH Dash_Punctuation
U+2015 ― HORIZONTAL BAR Dash_Punctuation
U+2053 ⁓ SWUNG DASH Other_Punctuation
U+207B ⁻ SUPERSCRIPT MINUS Math_Symbol
U+208B ₋ SUBSCRIPT MINUS Math_Symbol
U+2212 − MINUS SIGN Math_Symbol
U+2E17 ⸗ DOUBLE OBLIQUE HYPHEN Dash_Punctuation
U+2E1A ⸚ HYPHEN WITH DIAERESIS Dash_Punctuation
U+2E3A ⸺ TWO-EM DASH Dash_Punctuation
U+2E3B ⸻ THREE-EM DASH Dash_Punctuation
U+301C 〜 WAVE DASH Dash_Punctuation
U+3030 〰 WAVY DASH Dash_Punctuation
U+30A0 ゠ KATAKANA-HIRAGANA DOUBLE HYPHEN Dash_Punctuation
U+FE31 ︱ PRESENTATION FORM FOR VERTICAL EM DASH Dash_Punctuation
U+FE32 ︲ PRESENTATION FORM FOR VERTICAL EN DASH Dash_Punctuation
U+FE58 ﹘ SMALL EM DASH Dash_Punctuation
U+FE63 ﹣ SMALL HYPHEN-MINUS Dash_Punctuation
U+FF0D － FULLWIDTH HYPHEN-MINUS Dash_Punctuation
So even when U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS is being used, it is still dash punctuation. It’s just the world one to to use from the point of view of accurate typography, a vestige of the old teletypes and manual typewriters that no longer applies. If the BBC websites aren’t converting the code point into U+2013 EN DASH per UK publishing norms, that’s just laziness, the sort of thing you have in people’s cell phone text messages, not professional publishing.
