OBR chief Richard Hughes has quit following the leak of last week’s Budget – but the Tories suggested he was being forced out for exposing Rachel Reeves‘ lies.
In a letter to the Chancellor and the House of Commons’ Treasury Committee on Monday, Mr Hughes said he was taking ‘full responsibility’ for the error that saw Msa Reeves’
He added his resignation would help ‘the organisation that I have loved leading for the past five years to quickly move on from this regrettable incident’.
It came after Treasury minister James Murray told MPs that the Government would be considering the ‘serious’ findings of an investigation into the episode.
Mr Murray said the incident had been a ‘systemic’ failure, pointing to the conclusions that management should have been reviewing safeguards – and ‘market sensitive information’ had been released.
But the Tories had warned Mr Hughes must not be ‘scapegoated’ amid a separate row about Mr Reeves misrepresenting figures the OBR was giving her in private.
Earlier, Sir Keir Starmer used a press conference to jibe at the watchdog’s ‘significant error’ over the Budget leak and question the judgement of the independent body.
The 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.
Last week, Mr Hughes said he had been ‘mortified’ by the extraordinary leak and would resign if he lost the confidence of the Chancellor and MPs.
Richard Hughes, the chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility, quit today following the embarrassing leak of last week’s Budget
Sir Keir Starmer earlier used a press conference to jibe at the watchdog’s ‘significant error’ over the Budget leak and question the judgement of the independent body
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch insisted Rachel Reeves must not make Mr Hughes the ‘fall guy for her deception and lies’
Mr Murray said: ‘Last Wednesday, before the Chancellor (Rachel Reeves) had begun to give her Budget speech, the OBR published their entire EFO online.
‘Let me be clear, this is a very serious breach of highly sensitive information.
‘It is a fundamental breach of the OBR’s responsibility. It is a discourtesy to this House, and it should never have happened.’
The departure of the OBR head would 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.
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.
The leak report blames a technical glitch making the URL unexpectedly accessible rather than hacking, suggesting it was not simply that officials inadvertently put the material online too early.
However, the assessment notes that the same issue has existed previously – and uncovered evidence that the documents might also have been accessed prematurely during the last Budget.
That opens questions about whether people could have been able to profit from early knowledge of what was in the announcements.
One unique IP address made 32 attempts to get the document from the web address before it went live, indicating that the user was anticipating the mistake.
It was then downloaded 43 times between 11.41am and 12.07pm, when scrambling staff finally managed to take it offline.
Sir Keir said earlier 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.’
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
