Chancellor’s declare of £22bn ‘black gap’ in public funds is NOT backed up by Britain’s financial watchdog… sparking anger from her predecessor Jeremy Hunt

Rachel Reeves‘s claims of a £22billion ‘black hole’ in the public finances have not been backed up by Britain’s economic watchdog.

The Office for Budget Responsibility instead said only that the Treasury had failed to share information about £9.5billion of ‘net pressures’ on departments’ budgets.

While the watchdog says it would have reached a ‘materially different judgment’ on Tory spending plans had the information been available, the size of the ‘black hole’ is less than half that the Chancellor claimed.

Responding to the publication of the OBR review, Tory ex-chancellor Jeremy Hunt told the Mail: ‘They say no conclusive evidence their forecasts were inappropriate.

Jeremy Hunt (pictured today) had launched a last-ditch bid to prevent the OBR publishing the ‘highly political’ dossier on his legacy alongside the Budget

Rachel Reeves has sought to pin blame for her huge tax-hiking Budget on the Conservatives and the alleged ‘black hole’

‘They say you cannot judge how the £9.5billion would have scored but even if they had counted it all we would still have broadly met our fiscal rules.’

Mr Hunt had launched a last-ditch bid to prevent the OBR publishing the ‘highly political’ dossier on his legacy alongside the Budget.

He asked Cabinet Secretary Simon Case to delay the publication of the review. Mr Hunt was not contacted about the report’s content, despite being chancellor at the time.

Ms Reeves has sought to pin blame for her huge tax-hiking Budget on the Conservatives and the alleged ‘black hole’.

Delivering her Budget this afternoon, she told MPs how she had ‘exposed a £22billion black hole at the heart of the previous government’s plan’.

She added: ‘A series of promises that they made but had no money to deliver – covered up from the British people, covered up from this House.

‘The Treasury’s reserve, set aside for genuine emergencies, spent three times over just three months into the financial year.’

But the OBR’s economic and fiscal outlook, published alongside the Budget, found only £9.5billion of pressures within Resource Departmental Expenditure Limits (RDEL).

It said: ‘The Review of the March 2024 forecast for departmental expenditure limits found that £9.5billion of pressures within RDEL were not disclosed to the OBR at the time of the February 2024 challenge panel meeting that informed our pre-measures forecast.’

In a letter in response to questions about the review process, the OBR added: ‘The review found that in the run-up to the March 2024 Budget, the Treasury had information about £9.5billion of net pressures on departments’ budgets in 2024-25 which it did not share with us.

‘Had this information been made available, we would have reached a materially different judgment about resource DEL spending in 2024-25.

‘We cannot say how much higher our forecast for departmental spending in 2024-25 would have been, as we cannot recreate the further conversations that would have happened if we had had this additional information.

‘But we can say that the £2.9billion underspend against departmental budgets assumed in our March forecast would very likely have been dropped, and so there would have been a materially higher DEL forecast for 2024-25 in the March 2024 EFO.’