The Office for Budget Responsibility has published a 20-page report into the farcical leak that saw most of Rachel Reeves‘ Budget accidentally published an hour before the Chancellor stood to address the Commons.
The OBR, the government’s chief number-crunching arms-length body, describes the premature publication last Wednesday as “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.”
The quango immediately tasked its chief of staff to report on how the market-sensitive document was leaked, and has this afternoon published its findings.
Responding to the letter, the Treasury has thanked the OBR for its report, and said that the Chief Secretary will respond “in due course”.
The athors of the leak investigation have now suggested publishing future OBR releases onto the Government’s more secure .gov servers instead of using their existing WordPress plug-ins.
Setting out the timeline of the Budget day chaos, the OBR says the documents were first successfully accessed at 11:35am after having been uploaded to the website by a web developer, to a part of the website the OBR believed was not publicly accessible.
The OBR was then made aware of the leak at 11:43 when a journalist informed them that the Reuters news agency had broken news of the document’s availability two minutes prior.
At 11:52, the Treasury informed the OBR that the document had been made available by third-party sources, correctly guessing its URL.
One minute later, staff attempted to pull the PDF from the website, as well as pull the entire website offline, though struggled to do so due to the sheer amount of online traffic trying to access it.
At 12:08, the OBR finally managed to take the document offline and published its first statement on the hugely embarrassing affair seven minutes later.
Astonishingly, the OBR’s report, published this afternoon, reveals that their economic forecast document for the Chancellor’s March 2025 spring statement was also accessed prematurely, but this failed to become public.
Four days ago the head of the OBR, Richard Hughes, offered his resignation to Rachel Reeves over the leak.
While she has not yet accepted his offer, his future is widely seen as hanging in the balance.
Mr Hughes took over the quango five years ago, and his term in office would have ended some months ago had Rachel Reeves not reappointed him for a further five years in May.
This morning Ms Reeves was accused of trying to scapegoat her OBR chief in response to her shambolic second Budget.
Fresh fury broke out between the Treasury and the OBR when the watchdog revealed to the Commons Treasury Committee last Friday that Ms Reeves had been made aware there was no financial blackhole she needed to fill with massive tax rises.
Sir Mel Stride, the shadow chancellor, said: “Once again Rachel Reeves is pointing the finger. Whether it’s the numbers not adding up or Treasury leaks affecting people’s mortgages, Reeves always blames someone else or finds a scapegoat.
“It wasn’t the OBR that flew all these kites publicly or gave numerous press conferences that unsettled the markets. It’s the Treasury who have been playing games and they need to be held accountable for the consequences to ordinary people.
“There are many serious questions that remain unanswered around the misleading of markets. Reeves and Starmer must now clarify what they knew and when.”