The chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), Richard Hughes, has resigned following an emergency inquiry by the watchdog surrounding the accidental leak of Rachel Reeves’s Budget.
Hughes has stepped down after the release of an internal report into the OBR’s publication of the budget around 40 minutes before the Chancellor spoke in the House of Commons last Wednesday [26th November].
What actually happened?
The OBR report revealed the Economic and Fiscal Outlook was avaliable online between 11:30am and 12:08pm. It was accessed 43 times by 32 unique users in this time.
The inquiry revealed the first access was made at 11:35am by a user who had tried to gain access over 30 times prior to this.
At 11:41am the details were leaked by Reuters almost an hour before Reeves’s fiscal statement.
What has the OBR’s report said?
The internal report, published today [1st December], revealed that previous leaks had occurred within the OBR but had gone unnoticed, fuelling concerns about previous lapses under Mr Hughes’s watch.
The report branded the leak as “the worst failure” in the organisation’s history.
The inquiry attempted to place some blame on the Treasury. It concluded that its failure to give sufficient funding to the OBR’s online operation was partly to blame for its shortcomings.
In Richard Hughes’s resignation letter to the Chancellor and Dame Meg Hillier, he said he needed 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”.
He continued: “I have, therefore, decided it is in the best interest of the OBR for me to resign as chair and take full responsibility to the shortcomings identified in the report.”
The OBR’s internal report said: “The ultimate responsibility for the circumstances in which this vulnerability occurred and was then exposed rests, over the years, with the leadership of the OBR.
“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 Economic and Fiscal Outlook (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 investigation rejected suggestions that the early publication of the Budget appeared online as the result of a hack. It described the weaknesses that led to the leak as being “pre-existing”.
The inquiry concluded that the OBR’s website should be moved into the government’s “digital architecture”.
It is now believed they should follow many other independent bodies and move its online publication systems to the government’s independent subdomain.
The government’s next steps
Speaking in the Commons after the reports publication, James Murray, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, said: “This is a very serious breach of highly sensitive information. It is a discourtesy to this House, and it should have never happened.”
Murray continued by saying: “The government will be working in conjunction with the 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.
“In addition, the report says that they could not, in the time available, carry out a deeper forensic examination of other recent economic and fiscal outlook events, and we recommend that such an exercise is, with expert support, urgently carried out.
“We will make sure that work is carried out urgently.”
He also told the Commons that the details in the OBR investigation into the breach regarding the number of times access requests had been made “implies that the person attempting to access the document had every confidence that persistence would lead to success at some point”.
Reactions to the Budget leak
Prior to Hughes’s resignation, Sir Keir Starmer accused the OBR of having made a “serious error” by publishing the document early.
Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, accused Labour of using Hughes as a “human shield”, while the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesperson said the OBR must learn their lesson from this “catostrophic error”.
Following Hughes’s resignation, James Murray told the Commons: “May I put on record on behalf of the government our thanks to Richard Hughes for his dedication to public service”.
Featured image via House of Commons / Flickr.
