The Budget watchdog has said the early leak of key details of Rachel Reeves’s speech was not a case of “intentional leakage”.
The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) declared it as the “worst failure” in the organisation’s 15-year history with the reason behind the blunder revealed to be related to IT issues.
In the foreword to the report, Baroness Sarah Hogg and Dame Susan Rice, non-executive members at the OBR, said of the early publication: “It is the worst failure in the 15-year history of the OBR.
“It was seriously disruptive to the Chancellor, who had every right to expect that the EFO would not be publicly available until she sat down at the end of her Budget speech, when it should, as is usual, have been published alongside the Treasury’s explanatory Red Book.
(Image: House of Commons)
“The Chair of the OBR, Richard Hughes, has rightly expressed his profound apologies.”
Sir Keir Starmer said he was “bemused”, but not angry at the timing of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR)’s productivity review.
The Prime Minister said: “Well, I’m not angry at the productivity review.
“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.”
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