Treasury broke the law over the £22 billion ‘black hole’ says the OBR
The UK Treasury broke the law over the £22 billion ‘black hole’ says the OBR – contradicting Tory claims that their government was open and honest about its financial commitments.
Here’s the BBC:
The Treasury should have disclosed a £9.5bn overspend in the public finances in the run-up to the previous government’s Spring Budget “under the law”, the UK’s spending watchdog has said.
Richard Hughes, chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), told a committee of MPs on Tuesday the Treasury should explain why information was “not provided to us”.
His comments prompted the committee’s chair and Labour MP Meg Hillier to suggest the Treasury “may have broken the law”.
The Treasury has denied illegality – but said it has acted to ensure that “unidentified pressures” don’t happen again.
In fairness, while they have a duty to act in accordance with the law, civil servants also have a duty to do what they’re told by the government of the day; if there’s a conflict, situations like this may arise.
The Tories have not released an official statement on this (at the time of writing) – but former Chancellor Jeremy Hunt [pictured] said last week that the OBR should not have released its findings about the overspend on Budget day, because it would help make the case for Labour’s big tax rises, and that meant the OBR had sacrificed its political impartiality.
He said it was “impossible to know” how much of the £9.5bn would have been compensated for by savings elsewhere.
But isn’t that just saying he was hoping the money would appear as if by magic, rather than because of any plan he had made?
This suggests that the OBR – and the Labour Party – was right and there really was a “blackhole” worth billions of pounds in the previous government’s financial plans.
It may also be accurate that Labour made that hole larger with its own plan to raise pay for people who are paid by the public purse – but this is also a result of Tory failure (in this case, refusal to provide proper pay for a proper day’s work), so – again – it seems the Tories are at fault.
And if there was illegality on their watch, then they should be punished for it.
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how can you trust this government all they said they do they didn’t they act like their bigger brothers. so we have no change there
I worked in the Civil Service under the last Labour Government and remember the lies and the deception. Of course the Tories are past masters, it’s their life’s blood. But ultimately we can’t trust anything politicians say unless we have gone to the source and double checked it – even then..