Yesterday, 1 December, Richard Hughes – head of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) – resigned from his post. He jumped ship over his role in the recent fiasco around the premature publication of the Economic & Fiscal Outlook (EFO) prior to Rachel Reeves‘ Budget speech on 26 November.
Reeves is already in the hotseat over claims that she misled the public regarding the negativity of the UK’s financial outlook. In a 4 November speech, Reeves alluded to tax rises due to the country’s productivity being “weaker than previously thought.”
However, it’s since turned out that, halfway through September. the OBR actually told her that public finances were doing significantly better than their first pessimistic forecast. Reeves, for her part, neglected to mention this fact. In the real world this is known as ‘lying.’ However, in the political world, it’s a bit of a different story.
Naturally, both the chancellor and the PM have denied any wrongdoing. However, rival MPs – including Scottish FM John Swinney – have called for Reeves’ resignation. Now, with Hughes’ resignation, Reeves faces yet more trials as she seeks to appoint a successor.
How did the leak occur?
The OBR published a report on 1 December detailing the events around the leak. In its foreword, the report stated:
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
Between 11:30 and 12:08 on 26 November, anyone who correctly guessed the URL of the as-yet-unreleased EFO could access the document on the OBR’s website. Worse still, it was also cached on the Internet Archive at around 12:07. The OBR assumes that this “happened briefly and accidentally in the rush to remove the page”.
In those 38 minutes, 32 unique IPs accessed the document 43 separate times. The first access was at 11:35, from an IP that had tried to access the same URL 44 previous times that day, unsuccessfully. By 11:42, Reuters had published a news alert containing information from the EFO.
If all of that seems titanically farcical to you: good, it is. But wait til you hear the next bit:
those involved were working on the basis that the underlying technology used by the OBR ensured that pre- publication uploads were not generally accessible. The assumption was that 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.
.’We didn’t think WordPress would do that’. Truly a fantastic excuse.
The next bit
Professor Ciaran Martin, who advised on the OBR leak report, stated that the EFO’s publication protocols:
reveal a well-planned but significantly underpowered operation[…]more akin to that used by a small or medium-sized business (which of course in size the OBR resembles).
Martin also noted that the same error – a URL-guess leak – appeared to have occurred in March 2025. However, there was no evidence that anything came of that particular fuckup.
In any case, the report concluded that:
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.
And, sure enough, Richard Hughes published his resignation that very same day. Calling the leak a “technical but serious error”, Hughes wrote:
The report the OBR has submitted to the Treasury and the Treasury Committee of the House of Commons sets out how and why it happened and identifies the further actions the Office will take to ensure that it never happens again. I am grateful to Baroness Sarah Hogg and Dame Susan Rice for overseeing the report, to Professor Ciaran Martin for providing expert input, and to the joint OBR-Treasury team that produced it so expeditiously.
By implementing the recommendations in this report, 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.
Maybe a little dramatic, no? Sure, it’s an embarrassing fuckup, but the OBR would have published the document later that same day.
What does this mean for Reeves?
Unfortunately for the embattled chancellor, Hughes’ resignation lays yet more pitfalls in Reeves’ path. It falls on her to appoint a successor – the head of the OBR should have great economic laurels, but remain politically independent. For most, Hughes played that role to the tee. As the BBC reported:
One of the points of tension was the refusal of Mr Hughes to give credit to the government for “pro-growth” policies.
He had said he would not score any policy unless it was material in its impact on the economy. In the event, none reached the 0.1% of national income threshold.
If Reeves is even perceived as trying to interfere with the OBR’s political alignments, her rivals will hold it up as proof-positive that she’s determined to fiddle the country’s financial forecasts to her own ends. This, in turn, would feed into the narrative around her misleading the public still further.
For now, the OBR’s future leadership is still up in the air. What’s certain, however, is that Reeves’ peers will be watching her moves like a hawk from this point on.
Featured image via the Canary
This post was originally published on Canary.