UK OBR Chairman Resigns Over Budget Forecast Leak

Richard Hughes, the chairman of the United Kingdom's Office for Budget Responsibility, resigned on Monday following an investigation into the premature online publication of sensitive budget forecasts nearly an hour before Chancellor Rachel Reeves delivered her Autumn Budget speech last Wednesday.

The incident occurred when the OBR uploaded its Economic and Fiscal Outlook document to its website, inadvertently making details of the budget accessible to the public around 40 minutes early. The OBR's internal report, overseen by independent board members Baroness Sarah Hogg and Dame Susan Rice with input from former National Cyber Security Centre chief executive Ciaran Martin, described the leak as the worst failure in the organization's 15-year history. It attributed the breach to two configuration errors on the OBR's WordPress publishing platform, which allowed access despite assumptions that built-in protections would prevent it. The report emphasized that the error was technical and unintentional, not involving deliberate leakage or premature activation of the publish function.

In a letter to Chancellor Reeves and Treasury Committee chair Dame Meg Hillier, Hughes accepted full...