"It is the duty of the Office to examine and report on the sustainability of the public finances"
Robert Chote has exchanged letters with Alyson Stafford, Director-General Finance, Scottish Government on the subject of forecasting the Scottish land and buildings transactions tax and the Scottish landfill tax over our 5-year forecast horizon.
Vince Cable, the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, and Robert Chote have exchanged letters on the issue of the Government’s total spending assumption for the period from 2016-17 onwards on which the OBR’s economic and fiscal forecasts are based.
Our first Welfare trends report looks back at the past three decades of welfare spending and forward to prospects over the coming five years. We consider the key risks to our forecast for welfare spending, both inside and outside the Government’s ‘welfare cap’. Supporting documents can be accessed via the main Welfare trends report page…
Our latest Forecast evaluation report focuses on developments in 2013-14, a year that saw growth pick up strongly and the budget deficit narrow further. In particular, we consider why it was that we under-estimated the pick-up in growth from early 2013, but why did the budget deficit not fall more rapidly as a consequence. We…
Our 7th Working Paper explains the evolution of the public finances from the outbreak of the global financial crisis in 2007-08 to the end of our forecast in 2018-19. This period saw the largest peacetime shock to the public finances in living memory, and ends with one of the biggest deficit reduction programmes seen in…
The OBR’s non-executive members commissioned Kevin Page to lead the first External review into the work of the OBR in April. The Review concludes that the OBR has “laudably achieved the core duties of its mandate” and “has succeeded in reducing perceptions of bias in fiscal and economic forecasting”. It also makes recommendations on how…
Robert Chote has issued a note on the Government’s new proposals on migrants’ benefits announced on 29 July and the Government’s reference to £500 million of savings expected over the next five years.
The latest in our series of Working Papers were published on 10 July 2014. Working Paper No.5 – Output gap measurement: judgement and uncertainty uses a range of methods to demonstrate the uncertainty of measuring the output gap and considers the appropriate definition in the context of examining the UK public finances. Working Paper…
Robert Chote has written a letter to the Scottish Parliament Finance Committee outlining our long-term projections for UK oil and gas tax revenues.
Kevin Page, former Parliamentary Budget Officer for Canada, has been appointed to lead an external review into the work of the OBR, consistent with the requirements of the legislation underpinning the OBR.