Gaming Fiscal Rules Is No Way To Make Budget Policy

5th March 2024

The chancellor's room for manoeuvre is determined by the Office for Budget Responsibility and meeting fiscal rules that have fallen into disrepute.

The chancellor will take centre stage on Wednesday 6 March 2024 as he delivers his budget. It'll be Jeremy Hunt delivering the speech, taking the brickbats and the plaudits, making the headlines.

You might be forgiven, though, for thinking that it's not really Hunt who is taking the decisions. It's those shadowy beings at the Office for Budget Responsibility who wield the real power. With one changed line in their spreadsheets, with one adjustment to their assumptions, they can be the difference between Hunt the munificent and Hunt the stingy.

Week by week we have been fed news about whether they've seen the light and found a few billion of additional "headroom", or whether they've been overtaken by gloom and squeezed the chancellor's room for manoeuvre.

Read the full story at the Institute for fiscal Studies

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H M Treasury, London