Richard Hughes quits as OBR chairman

They think it’s all OBR – it is now. Political journalists should always be wary of that word ‘inevitable’. But from the moment it was revealed on Wednesday that the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) had accidentally leaked details of the Budget, it always seemed likely that this story only had one ending. Richard Hughes, the watchdog’s chairman, has tonight fallen on his sword and accepted responsibility for the data leak. It came two hours after a damning report was published into last week’s data breach, calling the incident the ‘worst failure in the 15-year history of the OBR’.

In a pithy letter of resignation, Hughes defended the OBR’s work but said that in order to allow ‘the organisation that I have loved leading for the past five years to quickly move on’, he has decided to quit and take ‘full responsibility to the shortcomings identified in the report’. A rapid investigation by Ciaran Martin, the former chief executive of the National Cyber Security Centre, found that the OBR routinely uploads its forecasts before publication time to allow ‘immediate and widespread access’ to the documents. The watchdog had – wrongly – assumed that it had configured its website, which it managed using WordPress, to prevent early access.

Hughes’s resignation comes after five days of mounting pressure from within key sections of the government. Keir Starmer was only willing to say the barest words of praise at his press conference this morning – but the Prime Minister’s anger was palpable over the ‘serious error’ of leaking ‘market sensitive information’. His next-door neighbour is even more infuriated. Rachel Reeves has spent recent days trading blows with the OBR about the agency’s public letter on Friday, which set out the timeline around her much-contested pre-Budget ‘black hole’.

There will be some satisfaction within corners of the Labour party at Hughes’s departure, given mounting frustration with the watchdog in recent months. His resignation buys Reeves a temporary respite as he will no longer be appearing at the Treasury Select Committee tomorrow morning. That means there will be no chance for Hughes to be grilled on whether Reeves misled the public on the scale of financial pressures before the Budget.

But it would be a mistake to think that Hughes’s exit will alleviate, rather than increase, pressure on the beleaguered Chancellor. In taking the honourable course, he has cast Reeves in an even more unfavourable light. Already the Tories are claiming that he served as a ‘human shield’ for the Chancellor’s failures. With even the cabinet now complaining that she misled her fellow ministers, Reeves’s future is far from assured.