Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, holds up the traditional red ministerial budget box outside No. 11 Downing Street before departing to the House of Commons to deliver the budget.Frank Augstein/Reuters
The head of the British financial watchdog that inadvertently leaked the entire government budget last week has resigned saying he needed to play his part in helping the organization move on.
Richard Hughes announced his resignation as chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility on Monday, less than a week after the OBR accidentally uploaded a detailed review of the government’s budget an hour before the Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves delivered it in the House of Commons.
“The inadvertent early dissemination of our economic and fiscal outlook on 26 November was a technical but serious error,” Mr. Hughes wrote in a letter to Ms. Reeves. “I also need to play my part in enabling the organization that I have loved leading for the past five years to quickly move on from this regrettable incident.”
In her response, Ms. Reeves thanked Mr. Hughes for his “many years of public service.”
The OBR is an independent public agency set up in 2010 to provide analysis of government spending and offer economic forecasts. The agency typically presents a lengthy assessment of the impact of budgetary measures immediately after the Chancellor has finished delivering the budget speech.
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Mr. Hughes’s departure came hours after the OBR released the findings of an internal investigation into the leak, which was described “as the worst failure in the 15-year history of the OBR.”
“We are in no doubt that this failure to protect information prior to publication has inflicted heavy damage on the OBR’s reputation,” the report into the leak added.
The investigation said that pressure to make the report on the economic and fiscal outlook (EFO) available immediately after the Chancellor spoke led to the use of a “pre-publication facility” by an outside website developer, which was not configured properly. The investigation also found that another sensitive report, released after Ms. Reeves gave an economic update last March, had also been accessed prematurely.
The report said that outsiders simply guessed correctly that the OBR would use the same internet address, or URL, for the EFO and change the date.
For example, the URL for last year’s EFO was: ‘OBR_Economic_and_fiscal_outlook_Oct_2024′. And for last week’s, it was: ‘OBR_Economic_and_fiscal_outlook_November_2025’.
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Media reports about the EFO’s conclusions first appeared an hour before Ms. Reeves spoke. OBR officials scrambled to take down the document, which runs more than 200 pages, but it took them nearly 40 minutes. By then, the EFO had been accessed 43 times by 32 unique users.
The investigation found that there was nothing to indicate that the leak “was the result of hostile cyber activity by foreign actors or cyber criminals or of connivance by anyone working for the OBR.” And it recommended that the OBR put new arrangements in place for future time-sensitive publications.
Earlier on Monday, Prime Minister Keir Starmer slammed the OBR for the mishap.
“I’m not going to suggest that what happened last week, which was the entire budget being published before the Chancellor got to her feet, was not anything other than a serious error,” Mr. Starmer said. “This was market-sensitive information.”
Mr. Hughes’s departure comes at a difficult time for the OBR. The agency has been locked in a war of words with Mr. Starmer and Ms. Reeves since last week’s budget over the OBR’s economic forecasts.
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Opposition parties have accused Ms. Reeves of painting a bleak picture of the country’s finances in the days leading up to the budget based on what she said was the OBR’s dim forecast for productivity. She used the information, critics argue, to justify a series of tax hikes.
However, in a rare intervention last week, the OBR said that it told Ms. Reeves that its projections for productivity were not that dire and that any shortfall would be offset by higher incomes, which would generate more tax revenue.
Ms. Reeves has denied misleading the public and said the OBR’s forecast still put the government in a difficult fiscal position.
The budget included £26-billion, or $48-billion, in tax rises. The extra revenue will be used to fund an expansion of a child benefit program and provide a bigger financial cushion for the government, she announced.
Critics have continued to pounce on the discrepancy between Ms. Reeves and the OBR.
“Someone has resigned as a result of the Budget chaos ... but it isn’t Rachel Reeves,” Conservative Leader Kemi Badenoch said on X after Mr. Hughes stepped down Monday. “The Chancellor is trying to use the Chair of the OBR as her human shield. But I will not let her. Why is it always someone else’s fault with Starmer and Reeves?”