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Liz Truss will meet the head of the UK’s independent fiscal watchdog today after a powerful group of cross-party MPs demanded the chancellor release a full economic forecast by the end of October – a month earlier than planned.
Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng will join the prime minister as they meet the Office for Budget Responsibility’s Richard Hughes before they are handed a first draft of its full fiscal forecasts next week.
The Treasury confirmed to Sky News the meeting is happening but would not comment on the fact it is highly unusual for a PM to attend an OBR meeting.
They also denied it was an emergency meeting.
A Treasury spokesman said: “We are committed to working with the OBR.”
The news that the pair will be having a meeting with the OBR came just hours after the Treasury Select Committee, made up of MPs from all parties, demanded Mr Kwarteng release a full economic forecast from the OBR by the end of October and bring forward his medium-term budget from 23 November.
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Mel Stride, Tory chair of the committee, had said in his letter to the chancellor it is “hard to conclude other than that an absence of a forecast has in some part driven the lack of confidence in markets”.
He added: “Some have formed the unfortunate impression that the government may be seeking to avoid scrutiny, possibly on account of expecting the OBR forecast to be unsupportive of the achievement of the economic outcomes the government expects from the Growth Plan, including 2.5% trend growth in the medium term.”
Mr Kwarteng had said the forecast would be released on 23 November but after last Friday’s mini-budget caused economic turmoil for the UK, the committee discovered the chancellor will be getting an initial OBR forecast on 7 October.
They asked him to publish “without delay” the initial economic and fiscal forecast the OBR provided to him when he started the job a few weeks ago.
A reply from the…
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Source : skynews
