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Richard Hughes, the chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility, has quit after the findings of an urgent inquiry by the watchdog into how it inadvertently published Rachel Reeves’s budget 40 minutes early.
Hughes wrote to the chancellor and Meg Hillier, the Labour chair of the Treasury select committee, on Monday saying he took “full responsibility [for] the shortcomings identified in this report”.
He wrote in the letter: “The OBR plays a vital role in the UK’s fiscal policymaking, and it is critical that the government, parliament, and the public continue to have confidence in the work that it does. The inadvertent early dissemination of our economic and fiscal outlook (EFO) on 26 November was a technical but serious error.”
He added: “I also need to play my part in enabling the organisation that I have loved leading for the past five years to quickly move on from this regrettable incident.”
His resignation follows the publication of a report on Monday that described the leak as “the worst failure in the 15-year history of the OBR” and strongly criticised the watchdog’s processes for protecting sensitive information.
The OBR’s error is one of several events that critics have said show the build-up to the budget was unusually chaotic.
The Conservatives are also calling for Reeves to resign because of briefings her advisers gave before the budget announcement that appeared to suggest the OBR’s forecasts were worse than they really were.
Treasury ministers thanked Hughes for his service at the OBR, but pointedly failed to express regret at his resignation. Hillier said: “I commend his decision to take full responsibility for the incident and I wish him well for the future.”
Hughes commissioned Ciaran Martin, the former chief executive of the National Cyber Security Centre, to assist with a rapid investigation into what happened, overseen by the independent members of the OBR’s oversight board, Sarah Hogg and Dame Susan Rice.
The report found that the OBR had uploaded its budget documents to a link which it believed to be inaccessible to the public. However, because the organisation was using a particular add-on to the WordPress publishing system, the link ended up being live, unbeknownst to the OBR itself.
More damagingly, the report found this was not the first time the OBR had inadvertently published budget documents early. Its authors said: “It appears that the March 2025 EFO was accessed prematurely on one occasion, though there is no evidence of any activity being undertaken as a result of that access.”
James Murray, the Treasury chief secretary, told the Commons on Monday he was concerned about the fact that someone had tried to access the documents several times before they went live.
“This unfortunately leads us to consider whether the reason they tried to persistently access the EFO is because they have been successful at a previous fiscal event,” he said.
“We do not have the answers to all of these questions, but I can confirm the Treasury will remain in contact with previous chancellors to make them aware of the developments that relate to previous fiscal events.”
Hughes’s departure came after Reeves told the Guardian on Friday that she had confidence in him.
