Category Archive: What’s new

Andy King will step down as fiscal expert on the OBR’s Budget Responsibility Committee following the conclusion of his five-year term at the end of August. Andy joined the OBR in 2013 as Chief of Staff and was appointed to the BRC in 2018. Before that, he worked in the Treasury in a variety of…

We have published our latest long-term assumptions, consistent with the forecast in our March 2023 Economic and fiscal outlook (EFO). These economic determinants that underpin our long-term fiscal projections are used by organisations inside and outside government to inform their own long-term modelling.

We have published monthly profiles for receipts, spending and borrowing in 2023-24, consistent with our March 2023 Economic and fiscal outlook, below and alongside our monthly commentary on the public finances.

Several of the UK’s tax bases are directly linked to activities that generate greenhouse gas emissions, with others indirectly linked. So as emissions fall as the UK transitions to net zero, receipts generated from these emissions-linked taxes will be affected. In this working paper, we conduct an initial, high-level analysis to explore the proportion of…

In November 2022, in Briefing Paper No. 8: Forecasting potential output – the supply side of the economy, we described the framework we use when assessing whether and how to incorporate the impact of policy measures on our forecast for potential output (the ‘supply-side’ of the economy). We have applied this framework in our November…

Richard Hughes distils the key messages from our latest Economic and fiscal outlook in his press conference presentation and accompanying speaking note.

While not a statutory obligation of the OBR, the publication of monthly profiles for the public sector finances consistent with our most recent EFO is something we started doing in May 2020, shortly after presenting our initial Covid reference scenario in the early weeks of the pandemic. Given the extraordinary pressures that the pandemic was…

Over the past 18 months, we have undertaken two separate user surveys to gather feedback on the length, content, and accessibility of our Economic and fiscal outlooks (EFOs). This article reports on the main messages from those surveys and how we plan to respond. December 2021 survey Our first user survey was conducted over December…

The aftermath of the pandemic was characterised by a stronger-than-expected recovery in demand. But this bumped up against domestic and international supply constraints, which were compounded by the Russian invasion of Ukraine leading to a sharp rise in inflation. In this year’s Forecast evaluation report, we consider the accuracy of our forecast for the economic…

Borrowing in the first nine months of 2022-23 was £128.1 billion, up £5.1 billion on last year but £2.7 billion below our November forecast profile in the headline figures and £11.3 billion below profile on a like-for-like basis (correcting for a temporary difference in student loans figures in our forecast profile versus ONS outturn). This…