"It is the duty of the Office to examine and report on the sustainability of the public finances"
Since the publication of our March 2016 Economic and fiscal outlook (EFO) we have received a request to publish further detail of our universal credit caseload forecasts. We have published this new supplementary forecast information on the main EFO page of our website.
Monthly commentary on the public finances – afternoon Public finances data for June 2016 will be published by the ONS and HM Treasury tomorrow, 21 July 2016, at 9:30am. Our regular monthly commentary will be published by early afternoon. It is worth noting that most of the period covered by these data preceded the EU…
Our Annual report and accounts detail our budget and finances for 2015-16, audited by the National Audit Office. It also sets out our achievements, details of our staffing structure, operations and our most recent budget settlement, which reflects the recommendations of the 2015 HM Treasury Review of the OBR.
In light of the vote to leave the European Union in last week’s referendum – and given the remit set out for us by Parliament in primary and secondary legislation – we have set out the OBR’s role in assessing the potential implications for the economy and public finances.
Despite a weaker outlook for the economy and tax revenues, the Chancellor has announced a net tax cut and new spending commitments. But he remains on course for a £10 billion surplus in 2019-20, by rescheduling capital investment, promising other cuts in public services spending and shifting a one-off boost to corporation tax receipts into…
Robert Chote has written to the Work and Pensions Select Committee in reply to a letter from the Chair. The Committee requested further information on the process of certification of Universal Credit policy costings and clarification of details of the savings associated with changing the assumed rollout profile of the policy.
Working paper No. 8: Anti-avoidance costings: an evaluation, looks back at the costings of recently announced anti-avoidance measures to assess their performance against the original costing. It finds that whilst a large number of measures perform close to expectations, there are on average more under-performing measures than over-performing ones.
Since the publication of our November 2015 Economic and fiscal outlook (EFO) we received a request to publish our estimate of the number of employees that will be paid the National Living Wage and the gender breakdown. We have published this new supplementary forecast information today, 22 January 2016, on the main EFO page on our website.
Robert Chote gave evidence to the Scottish Parliament’s Finance Committee on 6 January. He noted that the improvement in the underlying fiscal forecast in November’s Autumn Statement was small by the standards of most recent autumn forecasts and could easily be reversed.
November’s public sector net borrowing of £14.2 billion was up on a year earlier, largely reflecting the timing of various spending items and that the boost to receipts from last year’s bank fines was not repeated. We continue to expect year-on-year falls in the deficit to be bigger over the final months of 2015-16. Read…