The fate of the OBR’s chief is hanging in the balance today after Keir Starmer made clear his fury at the watchdog.
The PM used a press conference to jibe at the ‘significant error’ over the Budget leak and question the judgment of the independent body.
A report on the accidental publication of key documents published this afternoon admitted it was the ‘worst’ episode in the organisation’s 15-year history.
Extraordinarily it also suggested that the fiscal outlook papers – containing essentially the whole Budget – could have been inadvertently accessible online too early for years.
However, the assessment made clear that a technical glitch, rather than hackers or a blunder by one official, was behind the issue.
As well as the leak, tensions have been raging with the Treasury over the OBR revealing explosive details of when it told Ms Reeves there was no hole in the public finances.
That has fuelled widespread fury that she lied by talking up problems in the run-up, to soften up Britons for huge tax hikes.
Last week, OBR head Richard Hughes said he had been ‘mortified’ by the extraordinary leak and would resign if he lost the confidence of the Chancellor and MPs.
The departure of the OBR head could risk spooking markets in the wake of the Budget. There would also be a danger to Downing Street from Mr Hughes being free to speak his mind about the Budget process.
Former national cyber security boss Ciaran Martin has been drafted in to advise on the process, although it is thought to have been human error rather than hacking.
Sir Keir said today: ‘I’m not going to suggest that what happened last week, which was the entire Budget being published before the Chancellor got to her feet, was not anything other than a serious error.
‘This was market sensitive information. It was a massive discourtesy to parliament. It’s a serious error, there’s an investigation that’s going on.
‘But as for the OBR itself, I’m very supportive of the OBR for the reasons I’ve set out – vital for stability, vital and integral to our fiscal rules, which I’ve said a number of times are ironclad.’
Sir Keir also vented frustration at the OBR’s decision to do a long-term productivity review now – although the impact was more than offset by other forecasting changes.
‘Well, I’m not angry at the productivity review,’ the premier said.
‘It’s a good thing that reviews like that have done from time to time. I’m bemused.
‘Myself, I feel that doing at the end of last government and before we started might have been a good point to do a productivity review so we could know exactly what we were confronted with.
‘Doing it 15, 16, months into a government, it had to be done sometime, but picking up the tab for the last government’s failure – it’s been the nature of the beast, frankly, for the last 16 months, but it was given a special emphasis in that exercise.
‘I’m not angry, I’m just bemused as to why it wasn’t done at the end of the government rather than done now, but I’m not saying that these reviews aren’t important et cetera.’
Ms Reeves was left wriggling in interviews yesterday as she was confronted with details of how she talked up the problems in the government’s books, even after the OBR had advised her they were in fact forecasting a small surplus.
The timetable was spelled out in a letter from the independent body to MPs, published on Friday.
That drew a rare public rebuke from the Treasury, which said it had been assured such information would not ‘usually’ be made public in future.
Asked about the fate of the OBR chief yesterday, Ms Reeves said: ‘Look, there is no one who is a bigger supporter of the office for Budget Responsibility than me.
‘I reappointed Richard Hughes in the summer to strengthen the powers of the OBR…
‘It was clearly serious. It was clearly a serious breach of protocol.’
After the OBR letter was published on Friday, a Treasury spokesman said: ‘We are not going to get into the OBR’s processes or speculate on how that relates to the internal decision making in the build up to a Budget but the Chancellor made her choices to cut the cost of living, cut hospital waiting lists and double headroom to cut the cost of our debt.
‘We take Budget security extremely seriously and believe it’s important to preserve a private space for Treasury–OBR policy and forecast discussions, so we welcome the OBR’s confirmation that this will not become usual practice.’
