Lord Livermore (Lab)

I am grateful to my noble friend for his question. Yesterday’s letter from the chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility shows his views on these important overspends being kept from the OBR. My noble friend asks about the reforms that have been announced. As part of the longer-term plan to fix the foundations of the economy, we are going to introduce significant additional reforms to strengthen the fiscal framework and ensure that this can never happen again. Those initial reforms were welcomed yesterday by Richard Hughes, the chair of the OBR. He also said that he will initiate his own review to determine whether those reforms are sufficient, and he may make additional recommendations. There are two elements to what was announced yesterday. First, we will introduce a fiscal lock, which has already been introduced in the other place as the Budget Responsibility Bill. This fiscal lock will ensure that there is always proper scrutiny of the Government’s fiscal plans. Secondly, we will increase transparency by, in future, requiring the Treasury to share with the OBR its assessment of immediate public spending pressures and enshrine that in the charter for budget responsibility, in essence so that this never happens again—no Government can ever again cover up the true state of public finances.