With friends like the OBR, George Osborne hardly needs enemies

The Office of Budget Responsibility was created to be George Osborne’s friend. The theory was that under the leadership of Sir Alan Budd, the OBR would urge the Chancellor to cut. Budd would be listened to more than Robert Chote, who was then running the IFS. But when Sir Alan quit unexpectedly, Chote took over. Since then, the OBR has become the in-house prophet of doom. It not only points to a growth-free future for Britain, but keeps getting its forecasts wrong. It is proving laughably unreliable as a means for working out the likely effect of UK government policy.

In the Telegraph today, Doug McWilliams who wrote the original brief for the OBR, has attacked the current chairman for causing the Chancellor ‘no end of trouble’ and branded the organisation a ‘disaster’. In particular, McWilliams said the organisation has ‘completely failed to understand how to bring in information from the outside’.