#office-for-budget-responsibility

#office-for-budget-responsibility

Taxes are going up not because of Brexit, Ukraine, Trump, poor productivity or the tooth fairy running away with the magic money tree at the end of the Downing Street gardens. They are increasing because of conscious Labour policy choices to abandon welfare reform, eschew any cuts in public spending and tax working people more to raise welfare benefits - the express demands of Labour backbenchers on a Prime Minister and Chancellor too weak to resist them.

Britain's budget watchdog has said the early leak of its budget documents before Rachel Reeves made her speech was the worst failure in its 15-year history as it emerged a similar breach had occurred earlier this year. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) said an investigation had found that the leadership of the organisation, over many years, was to blame for the early release of its Economic and Fiscal Outlook (EFO) document online nearly an hour before Reeves's address last Wednesday.

After Wednesday's Budget, the chancellor Rachel Reeves is keen to point out that she hasn't raised taxes for working people, but if you look at the figures, we're all gradually paying more tax due to the government's clever use of fiscal drag. It all began back in 2021 when the Conservative Party froze the thresholds at which you start paying basic-rate and higher-rate income tax.

would be determined by what the system looks like, and that can only really be measured after the consultation has been closed and analyzed.

"It's truly astonishing that such a market-sensitive document could find its way online via official channels in advance of the Chancellor's speech," he said. "Basic compliance requirements should be in place to prevent this from happening. A complete review is required to understand how and why such a major breach occurred."

Rachel Reeves' reckoning will come from gilt markets

Our independent forecaster is likely to downgrade the forecast for productivity in the UK based not on anything this government has done, but on our past productivity numbers, which, to be honest, since the financial crisis and Brexit have been very poor, and that just shows how essential growth is. So I'm not going to do anything in the budget that reduces our opportunities to grow the economy. That's very important.

The budget is still a month away and speculation about its contents is already in full swing. Details of what Rachel Reeves has planned will dribble out over the coming weeks, but two things are certain: taxes are going up, and they are going up by a significant amount. Obviously, the chancellor would prefer not to be in this position.