Chairman of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), Richard Hughes, pointed fingers at Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt, blaming them for the watchdog’s inaccurate predictions. The OBR managed to get its deficit forecast wrong by £30 billion last November, apparently the fault of the government. If you are making forecast errors of that magnitude on a three-month time horizon you are simply not responsible.

Now Hughes is preparing for his forecasts to be wrong again. He claimed forecasts might swing by as much as £30 billion again this time round, claiming this is courtesy of ministers’ knack for deviating from their own plans. Speaking to MPs on the Public Accounts Committee, he said:

“As we all know, there are patterns of behaviour in Government where they say they are going to do things and then everybody knows they are not going to do them. But we have to believe them when they say it…So that could drive up to £20-£30 billion error in our medium-term forecasts of public spending.”

He agreed with some economists that Hunt’s Autumn Statement which announced £20 billion of tax cuts while pencilling in equally large spending reductions was “implausible“. And Labour thinks the OBR should run the economy…