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Richard Hughes has resigned as chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility, after the UK fiscal watchdog accidentally leaked Rachel Reeves’ Budget before the chancellor delivered it.
Monday’s announcement of his exit came shortly after an investigation by the OBR oversight board into last week’s market-moving error found that the same failures had allowed early access to the Spring Statement in March.
In a letter to Reeves and the House of Commons Treasury select committee, Hughes said he needed to help the OBR “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,” he wrote.
The OBR normally releases its economic and fiscal outlook, which contains market-sensitive economic forecasts, policy costings and judgments on the government’s fiscal rules, once the chancellor has presented the Budget to MPs in the House of Commons.
But last week’s assessment was released about an hour before Reeves began speaking, sparking sharp movements in bond markets as investors digested the nearly 200-page document.
A review into the leak published on Monday said that the OBR routinely uploaded its forecasts before publication time to allow “immediate and widespread access” to the documents.
The watchdog had wrongly assumed that it had configured its website, which it managed using WordPress, to prevent early access.
Last week’s early disclosure of Reeves’ Budget was the “worst failure in the 15-year history of the OBR”, Monday’s report said.
The report said the “ultimate responsibility” for the leak lay “with the leadership of the OBR”.
Speaking before Hughes’ resignation, James Murray, chief secretary to the Treasury, described the report’s findings as “very serious indeed”, but added it was right that the government and the Treasury select committee take time to respond.
Hughes’ departure comes after he sparked a dispute with Reeves over whether the government misled voters on the state of the public finances in the run-up to the Budget.
The chancellor said that downgraded productivity forecasts from the OBR had affected the UK’s fiscal position such that she might be forced to raise taxes.
But on Friday, Hughes, who had been in post since 2020, wrote to MPs that official forecasts for the public finances were much rosier than Reeves had suggested in the lead-up to the Budget.