The chancellor and shadow chancellor made a series of claims the morning after Rachel Reeves blamed the Conservatives for a funding shortfall.

“Those public finances were audited by the OBR just 10 weeks before the election was called,” Mr Hunt told MPs on Monday.

But the head of the OBR wrote a letter on Tuesday saying that he had only been made aware of some of the pressures last week.

He’s so worried about it that he has set up a review to assess the information provided to the OBR by the Treasury ahead of the Budget

  • futatorius
    2·
    2 months ago

    If true, why is Reeves going on the attack against Hunt since she had exactly the same figures as he did and this is easily proved.

    That assumes that the OBR-audited figures were the only ones available to Hunt. But it Hunt made deliberate attempts to conceal data from, or to mislead, the OBR, that would not be the case. It’s not unbelievable that an informal, parallel set of accounts was maintained, and that these were not disclosed to the opposition. Also, some of the discrepancies were to do with asset valuations that had changed over time, and it’s possible that civil servants were unaware of the changes. I’m unaware of the existing procedures at the Treasury for ensuring that those valuations are current and correct. In large government projects that I’m aware of, business cases and ROI calculations are seldom reassessed when a project is in flight, yet it’s not unusual for events to have transpired that undermine the initial assumptions that underpin a business case. Often, in my experience, this failure to update has more to do with staff shortages and competing priorities than to deliberate negligence or obfuscation. A malicious player could simply adjust staff priorities so that they were never able to get round to revaluing.

    It is also not beyond belief that Hunt’s reputation as a safe pair of hands was unfounded, and that he didn’t ask the right questions to assess the true state of the finances, either through incompetence, malice, or both.

    So why not just say that new information has come to light rather than going all in on “he lied to the nation” line?

    For one reason, Reeves might know more than she has so far disclosed. Leaks happen.

    My suspicions is that the Tories, out of implicit bias or self-interest, made ill-founded assumptions about the finances, and didn’t make corrections even when conditions changed and the assumptions were invalidated. It’s not coincidental that the errors were all in favour of the Conservative narrative. I personally would suspect that there was intent to deceive, but it might be difficult to prove that. But I think Reeves is a shrewd enough operator that she wouldn’t make accusations of this magnitude unless she had evidence.