The head of Britain’s fiscal watchdog has resigned following an investigation into how analysis of the Chancellor’s Budget was released early.
The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) mistakenly published its analysis of Rachel Reeves’ statement, where she announced £26 billion of tax rises, before she had delivered it in the House of Commons last Wednesday.
OBR chief Richard Hughes came under fire over the fiasco and on Monday confirmed he would step down.
In a letter to the Chancellor and Treasury Select Committee, he said: "The inadvertent early dissemination of our economic and fiscal outlook on 26 November was a technical but serious error.”
He added: “I am certain the OBR can quickly regain and restore the confidence and esteem that it has earned through 15 years of rigorous, independent, economic analysis.
"But I also need to play my part in enabling the organisation that I have loved leading for the past five years to quickly move on from this regrettable incident.
"I have, therefore, decided it is in the best interest of the OBR for me to resign as its chair and take full responsibility to the shortcomings identified in the report."
It comes as a Treasury minister revealed previous Budgets could have been leaked.
James Murray told the Commons that the Government backs a "deeper forensic investigation" into previous Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) disclosures.
The early release was a "fundamental breach" of the OBR’s responsibility, Mr Murray said on Monday.
He added: “On the morning of the Budget, the first IP address to successfully access the economic and fiscal outlook (EFO) had made 32 prior attempts that day, starting at around 5am.
“Such a volume of requests implies that the person attempting to access the document had every confidence that persistence would lead to success at some point.
“This unfortunately leads us to consider whether the reason they tried so persistently to access the EFO is because they had been successful at a previous fiscal event.
“At this time, we do not have the answers to all these questions. But I can confirm that Treasury will remain in contact with previous Chancellors to make them aware of the developments that relate to previous fiscal events.”
He later added: "The Government will be working in conjunction with a National Cyber Security Centre to take forward the recommendation that a forensic examination of other fiscal events is carried out, although let me specifically note for the House that the report finds no evidence of hostile cyber activity.”
It comes after Sir Keir Starmer faced a series of probing questions on Monday over whether Ms Reeves “lied” to the public and misled the Cabinet over a black hole in the public finances ahead of the Budget.
After a speech in central London on addressing poverty, welfare reforms and economic growth, including closer ties with the EU, he told how at one point the Government had considered breaking Labour’s manifesto to raise tax, with a mooted hike in the rate of income tax.
He said an alternative had emerged which meant that this course of action was not necessary. But he did not explain what this alternative was or what had changed.
The Prime Minister stressed that the starting point for the Budget had been a productivity downgrade forecast by the OBR, which dealt the Government’s fiscal plans a £16 billion blow.
But this was offset by October 31, nearly a month before the Budget, by better growth and tax forecasts.
The Chancellor had to repeatedly deny on live TV on Sunday that she had lied to the nation about the state of the public finances in a row which goes to the heart of the Government’s integrity.
“There was no misleading,” the PM insisted.
The OBR has said its leadership must take "immediate steps to change completely" how it publishes reports containing sensitive forecasts following its mistake.
It launched an investigation with expert input from Professor Ciaran Martin, former head of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), after official forecasts were uploaded to the watchdog's website, releasing details of the Budget almost an hour early.
It deemed the leak of its EFO before last Wednesday's Budget to be the "worst failure" since the watchdog was created by George Osborne as Conservative chancellor in 2010.
In the foreword to the report, Baroness Sarah Hogg and Dame Susan Rice, non-executive members at the OBR, said of the early publication: "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 was "not a case of intentional leakage", according to the report released on Monday, or a matter of pressing publish too early.
The OBR said it was caused by two errors linked to the WordPress publishing site it used.
The report into the incident said that, while it knew web addresses for its files follow a pattern, it assumed "the protections provided" by WordPress "would ensure it could not be accessed".
But two configuration errors were the technical causes of the premature access.
The forecast for the last spring statement in March was also "accessed prematurely" on one occasion, the report noted, but concluded that no activity appeared to have been taken as a result and the most likely explanation is "benign".
The report recommended a review of the watchdog's processes for publishing such documents.
