UK politics: OBR chief resigns, saying budget leak was ‘technical but serious’ error – as it happened
Here is the letter from Richard Hughes to Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, and Meg Hillier, the chair of the Treasury committee, offering his resignation.Richard Hughes, the chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility, has quit after the findings of an urgent inquiry by the watchdog into how it inadvertently published Rachel Reeves’s budget 40 minutes early.In response, Reeves said in a statement.I want to thank Richard Hughes for his public service and for leading the Office for Budget Responsibility over the past five years and for his many years of public service.This government is committed to protecting the independence of the OBR and the integrity of our fiscal framework and institutions.
The OBR has published a report saying said the early leak of its budget documents before Rachel Reeves made her speech was the “worst failure” in its 15-year history as it emerged a similar breach had occurred earlier this year,Keir Starmer has dismissed Tory claims that Reeves misled the public before the budget about the need for taxes to rise,In a speech and Q&A this morning, he also said the government would “keep moving towards a closer relationship with the EU”,(See 12,28pm.
)The NHS is to pay 25% more for innovative drugs in return for zero tariffs on exports of pharmaceuticals to the US under a deal with Donald Trump’s government.Resident doctors in England will go on strike for five days before Christmas as part of a dispute with the government over jobs and pay.Evidence cited by police which led to the controversial banning of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from a match against Aston Villa was based on facts changed to fit a decision, Lord Mann, the government’s adviser on antisemitism, told the Commons home affairs committee, the BBC reports.On Radio 4’s PM programme, Douglas Alexander, the Scottish secretary, was asked if ministers wanted Richard Hughes to resign as chair of the OBR.Alexander said, as far as he was aware, it was an independent decision taken by Hughes himself.
The Commons Treasury committee was due to be taking evidence from Richard Hughes tomorrow in his role as chair of the OBR,But, now he is the former chair of the OBR, he won’t be attending, the committee has said,However the hearing will go ahead with the other two members of the OBR’s budget responsibility committee (its three-person leadership team), Tom Josephs and Prof David Miles,In a statement, Meg Hillier, the committee chair, said:On behalf of the committee, I want to thank Richard Hughes for approaching his work with dedication throughout his time as chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility – often in trying circumstances,I commend his decision to take full responsibility for the incident and I wish him well for the future.
James Murray, the chief secretary to the Treasury, did not tell MPs that Richard Hughes would be resigning in his opening statement to MPs, or even make it clear that Hughes had lost the confidence of ministers (although he did later, around the time the resignation was being made public – see 4.33pm).But Murray made it clear that ministers were not minded to view this as an one-off mistake.He told MPs;I can confirm to the house that the [OBR report into the mistake] goes on to make clear that this is a significant and longstanding issue that has allowed external users to gain early access to the OBR’s publication which contains full details of their forecasts and the chancellor’s budget.In the days since the budget there has been speculation about what kind of error led to the economic and fiscal outlook being published.
The report today confirms that the cause was not, and I quote, “simply, a matter of pressing the publication button on a locally managed website too early”.The report concludes that the cause of the OBR’s error were systemic issues, and that … the problem exposed last week was not a new one.More significantly, Murray told MPs that the report implies previous budgets may have been hacked earlier, without anyone knowing, as a result of flaw in the OBR’s system exposed in the report.He explained:That market information should have been prematurely accessible to a small group of market participants is extremely concerning.That it might have been the case on more than one occasion is even more severe,But I do want to share further information from the report with the house today.
On the morning of the budget, the first IP address to successfully access the EFO [Economic and Fiscal Outlook – the budget report] had made 32 prior attempts that day, starting at around 5am.Such a volume of requests implies that the person attempted to access documents had every confidence that persistence would lead to success at some point.And this unfortunately leads us to consider whether the reason they tried to persistently access the EFO is because they have been successful at a previous fiscal event at this time.We do not have the answers to all these questions, but I think we find the Treasury where we make the contacts of previous chancellors to make them aware of the developments that relate to previous fiscal events.This is more alarmist than the OBR report itself, which says there is evidence that one person accessed the OBR’s 2025 spring statement report early, perhaps from a government-linked computer, and which calls for an investigation, but which does not make the argument that the person trying to find the report at 5am last Wednesday may have been an experienced hacker with malign intentions.
The James Murray statement on the OBR has just finished,Before it wrapped up, the Labour MP Andrew Pakes welcomed the resignation of Richard Hughes,He said:The leak of the OBR report makes deeply worrying reading, so I welcome the resignation of the chair of the OBR because leadership matters on these issues,It turns out that the leak was not as unprecedented as we thought last week,As we have seen, they have leaked earlier documents and they may need to go back further in their look at it.
This could have led to speculation and costs running into millions for us.In the Commons James Murray, the chief secretary to the Treasury, has just offered thanks to Richard Murray on behalf of the government for his public service.But he did not say he was sorry to see him go.His opening statement (see 3.50pm) makes it clear that the government was determined to blame the error on longstanding problems linked to the OBR’s leadership.
Here is the letter from Richard Hughes to Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, and Meg Hillier, the chair of the Treasury committee, offering his resignation,Murray tells MPs that Richard Hughes has resigned, he understands from messages passed to him,Callum Anderson (Labour) asks if the chancellor has confidence in the head of the OBR,Murray says the chancellor and everyone in the Treasury value the independence of the OBR,They are taking this matter seriously because they value its integrity, Murray says.
Paul Waugh (Lab) says the report implies that non-executive directors of the OBR do not have confidence in the leadership of the OBR.Murray says that is a matter for the OBR itself.Stephen Flynn, the SNP leader at Westminster, says someone put it to him on the train to London today that Rachel Reeves had been lying to the public.He suggested she should lose her job.Barry Gardiner (Lab) asks if anyone at the OBR has offered their resignation, or if that has gone out of fashion.
Murray says that is a matter for the OBR.Luke Murphy (Lab) says the Tories have gone from arguing that the public finances are in a terrible state to now saying that they are in a very good state.Daisy Cooper, the Lib Dem spokesperson, says in Sweden the government publishes a draft budget that can be amended.She asks if the government has considered that here.And she asks why in the budget speech last week the chancellor did not say that firms paying business rates would have to pay more because of revaluations.
She says the average pub will pay £12,000 a year more,On business rates, Murray says generous transitional relief is available,Meg Hillier, the Labour chair of the Treasury committee, says she has been “saddened and troubled” by the number of budget leaks,She asks for an assurance that the government is looking at what can be done to ensure this does not happen again,Murray says the government is taking this very seriously.
The Guide #219: Don’t panic! Revisiting the millennium’s wildest cultural predictions
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