Nigel Farage calls for inquiry over Rachel Reeves’s black hole ‘lies’ | Politics | News

Nigel Farage has called for an investigation into Rachel Reeves’ pre-budget claims to assess whether the Chancellor misled the public about the country’s finances. The Reform UK leader has called on the Prime Minister’s independent standards adviser to examine possible breaches of the ministerial code following the Chancellor’s claims about the country’s productivity in the run-up to the budget.

Ministerial rules demand that ministers “provide accurate and true information to Parliament” and “be as available to Parliament and the public as possible”. In his letter to Sir Laurie Magnus, Mr Farage accused Ms Reeves of “a sustained and deliberate narrative carried out on multiple platforms after the OBR forecasts became known to the Treasury and where the existence of the fiscal gap was not disclosed to Parliament or the public”.

Pre-budget speculation had suggested Ms Reeves faced a significant gap in her spending plans, partly due to a drop in productivity forecasts expected to be delivered by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR).

The Chancellor fueled this speculation in a speech in Downing Street on 4 November, saying weak productivity had consequences “for the public finances” in the form of “lower tax revenues”.

Mr Farage said: “Firstly, it was widely reported that weeks before the Budget the Office for Budget Responsibility had informed the Chancellor that he was on track to meet his fiscal rules by at least £4bn and never less than £1.5bn with unchanged policy.

“Secondly, despite this information, the Chancellor has waged a sustained public and media campaign to portray the public finances as collapsing in order to lay the political ground for tax increases of around £30bn which, according to the OBR’s own figures, are discretionary policy choices rather than inevitable fiscal necessity.”

Opposition politicians claimed this was “misleading” because the OBR had provided them with a forecast showing the situation was not as bad as feared.

Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch told the BBC that Ms Reeves should resign over her comments, claiming she was “raising taxes for welfare”.

The OBR delivered a productivity cut that wiped out £16bn of expected tax revenues, but much of this was canceled out by inflation and higher wage growth, leaving a surplus of £4.2bn in defiance of Ms Reeves’ borrowing rules.

But he noted on Sunday that this could be the lowest vacancy any chancellor has secured in breach of his fiscal rules.

Also ignored were decisions such as a U-turn on cutting winter fuel payments or welfare reform or the removal of the two-child benefit cap, which is expected to add £3.1bn to public spending by the end of the decade.

He told Sky News: “If I were on this program today and said I had a £4.2bn surplus, you would rightly say ‘that’s not enough, Chancellor’.”

The Chancellor added: “In the context of the £16 billion drop in our productivity, I needed to raise taxes and I was honest and forthright about that in my speech at the beginning of November.”

Ms Reeves also noted that if there had been no productivity decline, there would have been £20bn missing, excluding money that had to be paid for welfare decisions.