OBR says Budget leak was ‘worst failure in our 15 -year history’ | Politics | News
The Office for Budget Responsibility has published a 20-page report into the farcical leak in which the bulk of Rachel Reeves’ budget was accidentally released an hour before the Chancellor was due to address the House of Commons.
The OBR, the government’s most important body dealing with numbers, said last Wednesday’s premature publication was “the biggest failure in the OBR’s 15-year history”.
“This was seriously devastating for the Chancellor, who was right to expect that the EFO would not be made public until he sat down to the end of his Budget speech when it should have been published alongside the Treasury’s explanatory Red Book as usual.
“OBR Chairman Richard Hughes rightly expressed his deep apologies.”
Quango immediately assigned its chief of staff to report on how the market-sensitive document was leaked and published its findings this afternoon.
Responding to the letter, the Treasury thanked the OBR for its report and said the Secretary-General would respond “in due course”.
Experts from the leak investigation have recommended that future OBR versions be published on the Government’s more secure .gov servers rather than using existing WordPress plugins.
Setting out the timeline for the budget day chaos, the OBR said the documents were first successfully accessed at 11.35am after being uploaded by a web developer to a part of the website that the OBR believed was not publicly available.
The OBR was later made aware of the leak at 11:43am when a journalist reported that the Reuters news agency had reported breaking news that the document was available two minutes earlier.
At 11.52am, the Treasury notified the OBR that the document had been made available by third-party sources, having correctly guessed its URL.
After a minute, staff attempted to pull the PDF from the website and take the entire website offline, but they had difficulty doing so due to the sheer volume of online traffic trying to access it.
At 12:08pm the OBR finally managed to take the document offline and published its first statement about the hugely embarrassing incident seven minutes later.
Surprisingly, the OBR’s report, published this afternoon, reveals that the Chancellor’s economic forecast document for the March 2025 spring statement was also accessed prematurely, but was not made public.
Four days earlier, OBR chairman Richard Hughes had offered his resignation to Rachel Reeves over the leak.
Even though he hasn’t accepted the offer yet, it seems his future is uncertain.
Mr Hughes took over the quango five years ago and his term would have ended a few months ago if Rachel Reeves had not reappointed him for another five years in May.
This morning Ms Reeves was accused of trying to scapegoat the OBR chief in response to her messy second Budget.
Fresh anger erupted between the Treasury and the OBR last Friday when the watchdog told the House of Commons Treasury Committee that Ms Reeves had been advised there was no fiscal black hole she needed to fill with huge tax increases.
Shadow chancellor Sir Mel Stride said: “Rachel Reeves is pointing the finger once again. “Whether it’s figures that don’t add up or leaks at the Treasury affecting people’s mortgages, Reeves is always blaming someone else or finding a scapegoat.
“It wasn’t the OBR who had the markets on edge, flying all these kites in public or holding lots of press conferences. It’s the Treasury that’s playing the game and ordinary people need to be held accountable for the consequences.”
“There are many serious unanswered questions about misleading markets. Reeves and Starmer must now explain what they knew and when.”
