Chancellor Rachel Reeves has nominated Office for Budget Responsibility chair Richard Hughes for another five-year term at the helm of the public-finance watchdog.
Hughes, who is a former director of fiscal policy at the Treasury – and who also previously served as acting chief economist at the department – has held his current job at the OBR since 2020.
The OBR’s role of providing independent scrutiny of the government’s tax and spending plans is often not without controversy. Former chancellor Jeremy Hunt was scathing about the OBR’s November 2024 analysis of the state of public finances that the current government inherited from the Sunak administration after July’s general election.
Earlier in the year, Hughes was scathing about the lack of detail in the Sunak administration’s long-term spending plans, stating that they failed to even qualify as fiction.
On Friday, Reeves announced that she wants Hughes to serve a “second and final” five-year term of office as chair of the OBR’s Budget Responsibility Committee.
The BRC has executive responsibility for the OBR and is responsible for judgements made in preparation of the OBR’s economic and fiscal forecasts.
All appointments to the BRC require the approval of members of parliament’s Treasury Committee, and Hughes will need to attend a pre-appointment hearing in front of MPs before his term is extended.
Although the OBR has come in for criticism from some members of the Conservative Party in recent months, it was created in 2010 by then-PM David Cameron and chancellor George Osborne to provide independent analysis of the UK’s public finances.
Robert Chote was the OBR’s first chair. He is now chair of the UK Statistics Authority.