To the Commons, where Prime Minister Keir Starmer is speaking to the Liaison Committee before the House rises for Easter recess. The PM has spent much of this afternoon fending off questions on growth, healthcare and British industry – but it was on his government’s recently proposed welfare cuts that the Labour leader went on the attack, hitting out for the first time at the Office for Budget Responsibility.
Defending Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall’s benefits reforms announced last month, Sir Keir took at pop at the OBR over the way it scores the impact of the Labour lot’s welfare cuts. Speaking to the committee, Starmer insisted:
It is significant to my mind that the ability of any policy to change behaviour is not priced in. The OBR have scored nothing against any change here. The assumption is not a single person changes their behaviour. I personally struggle with that way of looking at it. I do think these measures will make a material difference and they need to make a material difference.
Oo er. Last month, the body claimed it was ‘unable to incorporate most of the supply-side impacts’ of Labour’s plans to get Britain back to work thanks to ‘insufficient information from the government on the policy details’. Do the PM’s remarks point to a wider concern among Starmer’s army about how the OBR operates? If so, it’s too little too late for former prime minister Liz Truss, who took to Twitter to fume about the organisation’s ‘flawed forecasting’, adding:
Sadly politicians and the media sided with the Blob and didn’t think for themselves… After all the chest-beating by Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves about strengthening the OBR, it would be good if they admitted I was right.
Shots fired! But while the PM was critical today, the OBR has promised to, next time, include the impact of reforms in its upcoming forecast. All’s well that ends well, eh?
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