Treasury minister: OBR could not have produced report in time for mini-budget
A Treasury minister has contradicted the UK’s independent watchdog for public finances, saying it would not have been able to produce a forecast in time for the government’s mini-budget.
Andrew Griffith, the financial secretary to the Treasury, told broadcasters the growth plan put forward by the prime minister, Liz Truss, and the chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, contained “a lot of detail” and repeatedly asserted it was “40 pages long”, meaning it would have been impossible for the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) to have produced an accurate forecast in time.
On Thursday night the OBR confirmed in a letter to an MP that it could have produced an assessment in time but was not asked to do so by the chancellor.
Truss and Kwarteng’s decision not to engage with the OBR over the £45bn package of tax cuts and £60bn energy support package unveiled last Friday has been widely cited by financial experts as one of the key reasons behind market turmoil this week.
In an unusual move, it was revealed that Truss will join Kwarteng on Friday at a meeting with Richard Hughes, the OBR chair.
Asked by BBC Breakfast why the OBR was not given the opportunity to make an assessment of the plan, Griffith suggested the level of “detail” in the plan made it impossible for the independent watchdog to assess it before the government published it.
“This growth plan is full of detail about how this government is going to grow the economy. Forty pages,” he said. “Details of infrastructure plans that have been long held up that we are going to crack through, detail about how we are going to bring forward the new clean energy revolution. It is for the OBR to ultimately decide how they reflect that in their plans.”
Pressed about how many pages were in a
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