Tory budget OBR failure 'may have broken law'

Treasury officials may have broken the law when they failed to alert the Office for Budget Responsibility about £9.5bn of spending that should have appeared in the March Tory budget, MPs have been told.

- Phillip Inman

Laws governing how the Treasury gives information to the OBR could have been breached when civil servants kept spending commitments under wraps, the government's independent economic forecaster said.

The head of the OBR, Richard Hughes, told the Commons Treasury committee that he had not complained at the time of the March budget "because what you don't know, you don't know". But he said the disclosure would have "materially changed" its forecast predicting the impact on the economy of Jeremy Hunt's pre-election budget.