OBR publishes report into its inadvertent release of budget report, saying it is ‘worst failure’ in its 15-year history
The Office for Budget Responsibility has now published its report into the “leak” of the budget on its website.
Here is an extract.
We are in no doubt that this failure to protect information prior to publication has inflicted heavy damage on the OBR’s reputation. 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. The Chair of the OBR, Richard Hughes, has rightly expressed his profound apologies.
It is also important to note that the EFO contains market-sensitive information, i.e. information that is not public and could have a material impact on financial markets. This is why, in the run-up to the delivery of the Budget, any leaks concerning the OBR’s forecasts, whether accurate (as in this case) or inaccurate, whether inadvertent (as in this case) or deliberate, are to be greatly deplored. They must be taken very seriously by institutions from which leaks emerge. As evidence of the seriousness with which the OBR takes this issue, we have noted that throughout the preceding months the OBR had stuck rigidly to the principle of confidentiality. It is beyond the scope of this report to assess what specific factors exerted what degree of influence on the financial markets on the morning of the Budget, but we are confident that the OBR will co-operate with the Financial Conduct Authority with respect to any information it might seek.
As of now, Richard Hughes, the OBR chair, has not resigned.
Key events
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Main recommendations from OBR’s report into accidental budget report upload
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What OBR say about why its budget report was inadvertently made available early to journalists
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Treasury on OBR report: ‘Chief secretary will respond in due course’
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OBR publishes report into its inadvertent release of budget report, saying it is ‘worst failure’ in its 15-year history
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Former Tory MPs Jonathan Gullis, Lia Nici and Chris Green defect to Reform UK
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Your Party adopts ‘targeted’ strategy for where it will run candidates, making pact with Greens more possible
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John Swinney says Reeves should resign, arguing she ‘quite clearly misled public’
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James Murray, chief secretary to Treasury, to make Commons statement about OBR forecasts at 3.30pm
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Reeves rejects criticism from unnamed cabinet ministers that she wrongly withheld OBR forecasts from them
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Starmer’s speech – snap verdict
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Starmer says UK has to ‘keep moving towards closer relationship with EU’
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Starmer declines to say if he expects welfare spending to be falling by time of next election
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Starmer claims to be ‘supportive’ of OBR, but says it should have published productivity review at end of last parliament
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Starmer declines to defend OBR’s decision to publish on Friday its pre-budget advice to Treasury
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Starmer questions why OBR chose to carry out productivity growth review when Labour came to power, not before
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‘There was no misleading’ – Starmer defends Reeves against claims she was not honest about about pre-budget state of public finances
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Starmer says he is confident UK can ‘beat the forecasts’ on growth
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Starmer says Britain has now ‘walked through narrowest part of the tunnel’
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Starmer says Labour ruled out cutting spending or raising borrowing because those options have been ‘tested to destruction’
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Starmer says he is ‘proud’ of budget, especially taking 500,000 children out of poverty
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OBR to publish report on accidental budget ‘leak’ at 2.30pm
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Badenoch restates her call for Reeves to resign
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What papers are saying about Rachel Reeves
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Bangladesh court sentences UK MP Tulip Siddiq to two years in prison in absentia
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Starmer to defend Reeves after claims that some ministers feel she misled them ahead of budget
Main recommendations from OBR’s report into accidental budget report upload
Here are the main recommendations from the OBR’s report into how its budget documents were accidentally made available to journalists early. It is recommending:
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An investigation into whether this happened with previous OBR budget reports. The team compiling this report only had time to look at what happened at the time of the spring statement this year. One IP address accessed that March report half an hour before publication, but the report says that was probably a “benign” incident, involvinng someone within government.
The OBR in its report on the budget “leak” says that it does not know what impact the early release of the budget document had on trading in the City. It says:
It is not within our competence to say what market movements between 11:30, (when the document was uploaded in pre-publication form but was unintentionally accessible) and 13:38 (when the chancellor concluded her budget statement) were affected by the achievement of early access to EFO material. We note however that those who secured early premature access did, at least, disseminate it quickly and widely, through the use of such mechanisms as Reuters alerts, rather than keep it for their private advantage.
Here is the passage in the OBR report explaining what happened in the 50 minutes after Reuters first published a snap news alert based on what was in the budget document it had accessed. It shows that at one point staff could not take it down because the traffic to it was so high. Another problem was that it ended up on the internet archive.
What OBR say about why its budget report was inadvertently made available early to journalists
The OBR report explains how its budget report was made available early to journalists by mistake.
It is a relatively simple story. The OBR is a small department, with just 52 permanent civil servants. It does not have its own IT department. It publishes material on its website using WordPress. Its staff upload material, but for budgets, and other days when important OBR documents are being published, an external developer is brought in upload material, because there will be a high demand the moment the documents are published.
At the OBR it was assumed that the pre-publication uploads would not be generally accessible because “even though the URL could be guessed because it followed a clear pattern from previous EFOs, the protections provided on WordPress would ensure it could not be accessed”.
That assumption turned out to be wrong.
The report says from 11.30am the web developed starting uploading the budget documents to the draft area of the website, which was thought to be private.
At 11.35am the first successful attempt to access that address was made.
At 11.41am Reuters ran its first news alert based on what the report said.
Treasury on OBR report: ‘Chief secretary will respond in due course’
Maybe Richard Hughes is not safe yet.
This is the statement the Treasury has just released in response. A Treasury spokesperson said:
We thank the Office for Budget Responsibility for their report. The chief secretary to the Treasury will respond in due course.
James Murray, chief secretary to the Treasury, is addressing MPs at 3.30pm.
OBR publishes report into its inadvertent release of budget report, saying it is ‘worst failure’ in its 15-year history
The Office for Budget Responsibility has now published its report into the “leak” of the budget on its website.
Here is an extract.
We are in no doubt that this failure to protect information prior to publication has inflicted heavy damage on the OBR’s reputation. 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. The Chair of the OBR, Richard Hughes, has rightly expressed his profound apologies.
It is also important to note that the EFO contains market-sensitive information, i.e. information that is not public and could have a material impact on financial markets. This is why, in the run-up to the delivery of the Budget, any leaks concerning the OBR’s forecasts, whether accurate (as in this case) or inaccurate, whether inadvertent (as in this case) or deliberate, are to be greatly deplored. They must be taken very seriously by institutions from which leaks emerge. As evidence of the seriousness with which the OBR takes this issue, we have noted that throughout the preceding months the OBR had stuck rigidly to the principle of confidentiality. It is beyond the scope of this report to assess what specific factors exerted what degree of influence on the financial markets on the morning of the Budget, but we are confident that the OBR will co-operate with the Financial Conduct Authority with respect to any information it might seek.
As of now, Richard Hughes, the OBR chair, has not resigned.
Former Tory MPs Jonathan Gullis, Lia Nici and Chris Green defect to Reform UK
A former Tory deputy chair has defected to Reform, saying that his old party has “lost touch” with voters, PA Media reports. PA says:
Jonathan Gullis, who also served as an education minister before the last election, is one of three former Conservative MPs to join Nigel Farage’s party in the latest round of defections.
A Reform source confirmed to PA earlier that Lia Nici, who served as Grimsby MP until last year, and former Bolton West Tory MP Chris Green, have also joined “on their own accord online”.
The latest round of defections are the first since Danny Kruger, the sitting MP for East Wiltshire, left the Tories to join Reform in September.
In a post on his Facebook page, Gullis, the Conservative MP for Stoke-on-Trent North between 2010 and 2024, said he had not taken the decision to defect “lightly”.
He said: “Over time, I have watched a party I once believed in lose touch with the people it was meant to serve.
“From failing to control both legal and illegal migration to pursuing a net zero agenda that has seen a rise in our household energy bills and put jobs in Stoke-on-Trent’s world-famous ceramics sector at risk, the Conservative party has understandably lost the trust of the British people.
As a country, we face serious and deep-rooted challenges, and what is required now are bold, radical ideas alongside the determination to deliver them.”
A Reform source said: “The Conservative party is dead. Only Reform can beat Labour at the next election as the polls show time and time again.”
There are now at least 17 former Tory MPs who have joined Reform UK. That list does not include Danny Kruger, who was elected as a Conservative at the last election, but who defected to Reform UK in September.
Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, has responded to Keir Starmer’s speech (see 12.13pm) by urging the PM to explicitly back a customs union with the EU. Davey said:
Keir Starmer’s speech talked about boosting growth but he is refusing to do the single biggest thing to achieve that – fixing our trade with the EU through a new customs union.
The prime minister’s own economic adviser has reportedly told him that a customs union would be one of the most effective ways to boost growth – but it seems he ignored her.
Your Party adopts ‘targeted’ strategy for where it will run candidates, making pact with Greens more possible
Ben Quinn
Ben Quinn is a senior Guardian reporter.
Members of Your Party have taken a step towards an electoral alliance with the Greens after voting to adopt a “targeted” strategy of only standing in seats where the new leftwing movement founded by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana has a good chance of winning.
While no such pact is currently in place, the decision not to have a strategy of trying to maximise the number of Your party candidates could play a role in some key battlegrounds in next year’s local elections where the vote to the left of Labour would otherwise have split.
They include Hackney, traditionally a Labour stronghold, but where Green councillor Zoë Garbett is hoping to build on momentum behind her party and succeed next year on her third attempt at winning the borough’s mayoral election.
Other results that have been released from voting at the weekend at the first inaugural conference of Your party meanwhile commit the new movement to endorsing leftwing “community independents” in English local elections next year.
Independent leftwingers have won increasing numbers of seats in recent years, amid defections from Labour over domestics policies, but also particularly, as a result of positions taken by its leadership in relation to Gaza.
The results were released after a weekend when members voted to formally adopt the name Your Party, the placeholder which had been used after its launch earlier this year, although continuing internal divisions played out as Sultana boycotted the first day.
The stances of Your Party members for the Holyrood and Senedd elections next year will be decided democratically by members in each nation in the coming weeks, alongside the party’s structures in Scotland and Wales respectively.
John Swinney says Reeves should resign, arguing she ‘quite clearly misled public’
Libby Brooks
Libby Brooks is the Guardian’s Scotland correspondent.
John Swinney, Scotland’s first minister, has called for Rachel Reeves to resign, saying the chancellor must “face the consequences” after she “quite clearly misled the public and the financial markets”.
Swinney weighed in on the growing row about whether Reeves deliberately misled voters when she warned about the impact of lower growth forecasts by the Office for Budget Responsibility.
He told BBC Scotland News:
She had information from the Office for Budget Responsibility that indicated that the financial challenges that she faced were not as great as she presented them to be.
If the public cannot rely on the chancellor being straight with them, then I don’t know how we can function in our governance.
So I think Rachel Reeves has got to face the consequences of misleading the public in the way that she has.
Last week Reeves said her decisions would release an extra £820m in funding for the Scottish government over the next three years. The funding boost, as well as the scrapping of the two-child limit, was welcomed by Scottish Labour who hope the package may go some way to assuaging voter anger with Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves ahead of next May’s key Scottish parliament elections.
Rachel Reeves has said she is absolutely confident that she will still be chancellor at the time of the next election.
At the Wales Investment Summit, asked by PA Media how confident she was about keeping her job until the election, she replied:
I’m absolutely confident.
I set out in a speech a couple of weeks before the budget that the ambition for the budget was to cut NHS waiting lists, cut the cost of living, and cut the debt and the deficit. We’ve achieved all of those things.
Photograph: Ben Birchall/PA
James Murray, chief secretary to Treasury, to make Commons statement about OBR forecasts at 3.30pm
James Murray, the chief secretary to the Treasury, will give a statement to MPs about the OBR forecasts. It will come at 3.30pm.
The opposition were planning to table an urgent question on the OBR information released on Friday (which has prompted the claims that Rachel Reeves misled the public about the need for tax rises), and it is likely that the Treasury agreed to schedule a statement knowing that, if they did not, the speaker would grant a UQ.
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